PRINCETON, NJ — Although a majority of Americans believe the seriousness of global warming is either correctly portrayed in the news or underestimated, a record-high 41% now say it is exaggerated. This represents the highest level of public skepticism about mainstream reporting on global warming seen in more than a decade of Gallup polling on the subject.

As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup’s 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%.

The trend in the “exaggerated” response has been somewhat volatile since 2001, and the previous high point, 38%, came in 2004. Over the next two years, “exaggerated” sentiment fell to 31% and 30%. Still, as noted, the current 41% is the highest since Gallup’s trend on this measure began in 1997.

…

Notably, all of the past year’s uptick in cynicism about the seriousness of global warming coverage occurred among Americans 30 and older. The views of 18- to 29-year-olds, the age group generally most concerned about global warming and most likely to say the problem is underestimated, didn’t change.

Bill now thats calling the kettle black.After all the lies the global warming crowd have given us the truth is finally coming out.This is nothing more a cycle and we are into a cooling cycle now.Hope you still have your winter coat cause you’re going to need .By the way it’s snowing in Texas again and it’s march 11th.

Can someone explain to me why sceptics are so fixated with public opinion. CC is a science debate – well it would be if the sceptics ever got around to publishing science papers.
The laws of physics won’t change just because a group of non-experts have been confused by the misapplication of media norms.

Only 28% of Americans believe the GW problem is underestimated. More Americans, 33%, believe it is likely or somewhat likely we have been visited by extraterrestrials.http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/34758

Since the reporting has been pretty consistent since 2006, these numbers imply actual AGW defectors.
If it was merely the reporting which was getting more exaggerated, then the numbers might have implied consistent beliefs.

I don’t know if the poll results reflect a real change in public sentiment or are just a reflection of our economic times.
I recall reading about past ‘global crisis’. In previous decades, people were more concerned about basic survival. It’s a sign of our prosperity to believe we have the resources to fight a global problem.
Poor people are worried about getting through next week, or through next winter. Wealthy people are concerned about the environment and the distant future.
Still, we can use the economic problems as a good reason to not enact any climate change regulations. The longer we can delay, the more science we will have to back us up.

Clearly young people are the more gullible. I believed in all of the alarmist global warming nonsense when I was in my 20s.
I mean, I even double checked to make sure the Millenium Bug had not caused the collapse of civilisation.

DJ-er, laws of physics? Pardon? How do you get to 2.5 Degrees C for 2xCO2 from just physical laws? More over, evidently you are totally ignorant of the masses of papers which seriously question some of the major assumptions behind alarmist AGW theories. Why don’t you look up some of the big names on google scholar? I don’t feel like doing your homework for you.

I stand corrected. Contrary to my expectations, 57% of Americans can neither read a thermometer nor detect when they’re up to their behinds in snow and ice. The younger ones seem particularly oblivious; “We’re all going to burn up and die!”

I do these kind of surveys for a living. I do not trust the numbers. They are way too volatile and reflect whatever is on the front page, e.g. 2005 Hurricane Season. Now a survey of atmospheric physicists who are not dependent upon grants based on AGW relevance and already have tenure – that is something I would take more seriously

DJ,
There are no humans with the capability to directly determine the severity (or lack thereof) of long term global warming.
There is only a very small handful of people who have enough knowledge to make determinations about the accuracy of the computer models being used to make future climate predictions.
Whatever the “consensus” is in the scientific community, at least 99% of them have based their viewpoint strictly on hearsay.
It is incredibly elitist (and clueless) to suggest that people are incapable of determining whether the climate is getting colder or warmer where they live.

D J we want to know the truth.That’s why we read this web site daily .By the way when did the debate ever take place??? Was it behind closed doors and where did Al Gore do with the hockey stick or was that James Hanson who had it?By the way there was A confrecnce in New York this wek and there were many scientist who don’t believe the global warming lies and as of may 08 there were at least 31000 scientist who don’t believe in global warming.

Aron,
Yes, in my 20s I could not wait to vote for the “liberal” ideas/politicians/policies. I was so selfishly upset when Kennedy was assassinated — because I was deprived of an opportunity to vote for him.
Now I am an independent (according to a lengthy personality profile test, I’m dead center). Now, I question everything — and often “run the numbers” myself. I am far left in some things, far right in others.
To me AGW is a science question a “question of facts” — neither “left” nor “right” ideology comes into play. Consensus and polls do not impact my “skepticism”.
However, polls are important because AGW is politics now — as was the Millennium bug scam. Policy will not change because of “facts”. Only “public skepticism” and voter demands will change the pro-AGW policy now.

“PRINCETON, NJ — On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. These attitudes are strongly related to education and, to an even greater degree, religiosity”http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/Darwin-Birthday-Believe-Evolution.aspx
What are the poll numbers like in countries whos population have a bit of scientific education?
“Only a third of adults, however, believe it’s either very likely or somewhat likely that intelligent aliens from space have visited our planet, according to a survey of 1,003 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University”http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/34758
A country that gives the world a creationist museum with dinosaurs walking with Adam doesnt ‘believe’ in global warming.

I’m not sure where to post this, so apologies in advance for being off topic,Stupidity
The very organ that hosts Christopher Booker has posted another idiotic scientific prediction on rising sea levels, along with an oh so dramatic photograph of the Houses of Parliament under water!

DJ (13:30:28) :
Can someone explain to me why sceptics are so fixated with public opinion. CC is a science debate – well it would be if the sceptics ever got around to publishing science papers.
It’s more political than science. I’m still waiting for that smoking gun proof from your side of the fence DJ.

Dorlomin,
Alfred Wegener proposed the ridiculous idea that continents have moved over time, and suffered through a lifetime of ridicule from the scientific community for proposing such an absurd idea.
Same story for Galileo. Anyone looking up in the sky at night can see the stars going in a circle around the earth.
And those foolish women who refused to take thalidomide in the 1950s, after the scientists told them it was perfectly safe. The nerve…..
Only a complete idiot would stand in the way of a few fanatical scientists who demand that we shut down our primary source of electricity and heat. Because the loudest scientists are always the most correct ones.

I’m a 24 fan but the global warming PSA’s make me want to throw the remote through the screen. How could we get a pro-rational science PSA on 24? Someone must have some money. Watts Up With That has the talent…

DJ:
“The laws of physics won’t change just because a group of non-experts have been confused by the misapplication of media norms.”
Correct. The problem is that the physics are not clear, as evidenced by all the debate among physicists (and don’t kid yourself, there is a LOT of debate among accomplished physicists, although you are being told there is not by the political types). Much of the stuff you read about the physics of AGW is spouted by non-physicists, some of whom don’t know any more physics than us chemists.

> Steven Goddard
Same story for Galileo. Anyone looking up in the sky at night can see the stars going in a circle around the earth.
Steven,
Galileo did not come up with the theory that the earth circles the sun, that was Copernicus. Galileo though he proved that the earth circles the sun by engineering a better telescope. He was proved wrong using mathematics. Later it was Kelper who showed that the earth ellipses around the sun.
Mike

Reply to DJ’s comment:
“Can someone explain to me why skeptics are so fixated with public opinion. CC is a science debate – well it would be if the skeptics ever got around to publishing science papers. The laws of physics won’t change just because a group of non-experts have been confused by the misapplication of media norms.”
Your comment is very naive isn’t it? Climate Change is NOT a scientific debate any longer. It has become a political debate. And politics are driven by public opinion. The politicians then make policy and pass foolish legislation based upon those public opinions… such as taxing us for carbon footprints.
We’ll be taxed and our lifestyles will be changed long before the debate is settled and all the science is in. Then what are the governments gonna do if the AGW theory is wrong? You think they will give me a CO2-tax rebate?
You must already know that the California Air Resources Board is already making changes to car emissions standards based upon the “science” of global warming. Soon we will all be driving those tiny Smart cars. They even proposed taxing us on how many miles we drive each year and tax us proportionally to the CO2 emissions for it (as if the gax taxes aren’t enough). They are actually considering it in the state assembly!
I just can’t wait until they (politicians) decide to consider putting an exhale-o-meter on everyone’s face and tax them for how much CO2 we breathe-out. Or maybe they should add a surtax on health clubs because there is a lot of extra CO2 pumping out of those places as people do their workouts. Then, there is the ever popular proposed methane-limitation taxes for cattle farms.
There are so many variables in the climate that I doubt debate can ever be won in our lifetimes.
Here near San Diego, the POLITICIANS almost shut down a relatively harmless desalination plant project that will supply clean water to 100,000 homes. Local public opinions from (some) environmentalists actually believe that the small amount of CO2 expelled from running the plant is going to cause more global warming. In order to proceed, the project owners had to agree to purchase carbon offsets (plant trees)…which I am sure Al Gore and his offset trading deals will get a piece of that money.
The skeptics just don’t want their data suppressed or ignored by politicians and the media. But data and whitepapers don’t sell as much as a P.T. Barnum-type show. Hype sells (like Al Gore’s fear mongering movie and all the Hollywood types who used fame and glitz to promote it).
DJ said “well it would be if the skeptics ever got around to publishing science papers.”
I don’t think you are aware of the hundreds of papers and opinions the skeptics have indeed published and often reference in this blog and elsewhere. The problem is: the politicians and grandstanders don’t read them either. Instead they go with media hype and megalomaniacs (Al Gore, Hansen – in my opinion), because we humans all need that gloom and doom headline that say things like: “Asteroid narrowly misses hitting earth!” or “The bird pandemic is going to wipe out large populations!”

“”” DJ (13:30:28) :
Can someone explain to me why sceptics are so fixated with public opinion. CC is a science debate – well it would be if the sceptics ever got around to publishing science papers.
The laws of physics won’t change just because a group of non-experts have been confused by the misapplication of media norms. “””
Dj, Gallup is a polling organisation; that’s what they do; that’s what they get paid good money to do; so that’s why they did this poll.
I doubt that any MMGWCC “skeptic deniers” commissioned the poll, but since it’s been published it simply becomes news; just like the news that Hansen’s predictions have so far failed to come to pass.
We have already endured a big enough fraction of his 2100 AD prediction that we should be able to observe what his “trend” data predicts; and of course that hasn’t happened; if anything it has gone in exactly the opposite direction; which doesn’t say much for his prediction AlGorithms.
You only have to look at any published version of GISStemp anomaly or any of the weather station inputs to his AlGorythm, to realize that in no case is the next data point predictable, or even whether it will be up or down from the most recent data point. It is simply fractal random data that looks the same on any time scale; so there is no “trend” to extrapolate out 100 years.
Why would any of the “Skeptics” want to publish “science papers”; the peer review system is so corrupted they never would get published anyway. Even the National Academy of Sciences will not publish a “minority report” of even its own members who dissent from the “concensus” view that the academy finally issues; and that is from an organisation that self selects its own members; but is not against having a back door entry ticket for “environmentalists” who will follow the party line.
As for the laws of physics not changing; it wouldn’t matter if they did, because one thing is for sure; they certainly aren’t being followed by that field of endeavor that calls itself “climatology”.
The Japanese government Science advisors recently described the IPCC trappings as “ancient Astrology” and in that they are being unkind to ancient astology.
Even in the posts on this forum; there’s a lot more that is simply statistical mathematics than there is that is physics. And shifting a standard deviation a few points this way or that is not going to suddenly shift a quite robust stable physical system into an unstable system that has been unseen over the last 4.5 billion years.
There are experts and there are experts; but who is going to pay any attention to self annointed “experts” whose predictions come within a 3:1 fudge factor and all their findings are “within the range of the projections.”
Real scientists are alarmed by a model that predicts a discrepancy of a measly 34 seconds of arc per century in the observed and predicted rates of precession of the perihelion of Mercury. And they are supposed to be impressed by a science whose most vaunted models predict a 3:1 range of outcomes that is already falsified after only 10% of the prediction time frame. Don’t call that Science; it’s wild A** guesswork (at best).
I’d be happy if the “experts” of the climatology world (who are they by the way) would simply admit that their global surface data measuring system; upon which the whole public exposure depends, simply fails by orders of magnitude to follow the most basic laws of sampled data systems. So much for them being experts; just point me to one who even knows what the basic rules of sampled data systems even are. These experts would show up for a golf game with their chess sets tucked under their arms; that’s how much they know about the laws of physics that apply to the system they are trying to model.
I’m sure there are those among the climate “realists” who know that the earth is not behaving the way the models say it should; who would be happy to debate the physics with those who dream up those non-working models; but it is the “experts” who are unwilling to join the debate; well the science is settled right.
So if the science is settled; why the blazes are the taxpayers still putting out billions of dollars each year to otherwise unemployed “climate scientists”. What’s to study if the science is settled? move out those “Experts” their science work is done; time to call in the engineers to fix the problem; the experts can go flip hamburgers at McDonalds.
George

Dorlomin,
You’re name was invented by one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century (born in the 19th, actually). And he was a devout Christian who didn’t believe in evolution.
So what was your point?

Probably more due to economic realities than to a change in perception.
Still, it speaks well of the grounded common sense orientation of the American public. After years of an incessant AGW-oriented media blitz, the whole silliness is still not being swallowed. Give ’em a bit of cap and trade along with the resulting run-up in their bills and those poll numbers will really look like a hockey stick…

As was reported earlier, the temperature this morning at the Edmonton, Alberta airport was -42 degrees C. However, in downtown Edmonton, it was “only” -30 degrees C. This gives you an idea of how significant the UHI effect is. The lower the temperature, the greater this effect is since more heat will be supplied to the buildings to make the temperature inside “normal”.

Jae,
Speak for yourself. I’m a PhD physical chemist and there isn’t a single discipline related to global warming (molecular spectroscopy, black body radiation, emissivity, (non)adiabatic heating/cooling and heat transfer, radiative heating, etc.) that aren’t required fields of study for the degree. Look up who Svante Arrhenius was, what his profession was, and what interesting theory involving atmospheric CO2 he first postulated.
There is no single “disinterested” field of scientific specialization more suited to understand the merits of the scientific arguments involved in “climate change.” Of course, when the AGW crowd gets busy playing fast with the data the statisticians are the best front line.

>Steve
But it was Galileo’s outspoken support of Copernicus’ theory that got him in trouble.
He was sort of like Hansen. He insisted he was right when we was proven wrong mathematically – and he was just as obnoxious.
Mike

Quick thoughts:
The millennials are quickly acquiring the repuation as being the dumb and/or gullible generation.
Aron, you crack me up – a welcome addition to the board.
Given the view that once a person crosses over to the dark side (i.e., skeptical side) that persone stays on the dark side (i.e., one has made up his/her mind to be a skeptic), I don’t see how this poll is good news to Gore. Right now, in my opinion, you have 41 people out of 100 that will be forever skeptical.

This may be part of the problem. Even if AGW were a valid theory people can become numb to a constant stream of … models clearly demonstrate … end of the world … kitten drowned today … stories. Perhaps one reason some warmlings seem to be asking for moderation?
Seems to me that some scientists are beginning to realise that they have lost control of the debate and of the interpretation of the science.
Perhaps they will end up including “actual interpretation may vary” or more likley “(…) makes no representation or warranty of any kind, expressed or implied, as to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or any other matter relating to this product.” on every page.

No, Galileo’s statement that the Bible was wrong when it said that the sun stood still in the sky (Joshua) is what got him in trouble.
Learn the facts instead of regurgitating what anti-Christian bigots say.
Based on the actual known facts of the time, it was reasonable to question Copernicus’ (actually, Aristarchus’) theory. Most use the Galileo incident as a foil against religion and use tissue thin arguments like “Copernicus’ model is more elegent and Occam’s Razor therefore says it is the better theory” and 500 *subsequent* years of observational astronomy to attack a straw-man they set up for the Rennaisance Catholic church and Christianity in general.
In fact, the Pope at the time had a very civilized *scientific* discussion with Galileo regarding heliocentrism at the time and posed a defense of geocentrism that Galileo simply couldn’t answer (and admitted so) at the time: if the earth moves, why don’t we see apparent stellar motion (parallax)? The “obvious” answer, that stars were trillions of miles away, was even impossible for Galileo to postulate at the time. No one could possibly imagine that the universe was that large at time time and there certainly was no obvious scientific observation to suggest it.
Is this where I should point out that Einstein (correctly) observed that the Big Bang theory was virtually indistinguishable from Genesis and denounced it as religion masquerading as pseudo-science and promptly “invented” the cosmological constant to make the evidence for the Big Bang in his theory of relativity magically disappear?
Let’s see, Einstein ignores Hubble’s observations and invents the cosmological constant out of whole cloth because he doesn’t like what it suggests about the universe and the Pope follows the best available scientific evidence regarding the nature of the universe… who was the better scientist?

“”” Merrick (15:50:59) :
Jae,
Speak for yourself. I’m a PhD physical chemist and there isn’t a single discipline related to global warming (molecular spectroscopy, black body radiation, emissivity, (non)adiabatic heating/cooling and heat transfer, radiative heating, etc.) that aren’t required fields of study for the degree. Look up who Svante Arrhenius was, what his profession was, and what interesting theory involving atmospheric CO2 he first postulated.
There is no single “disinterested” field of scientific specialization more suited to understand the merits of the scientific arguments involved in “climate change.” Of course, when the AGW crowd gets busy playing fast with the data the statisticians are the best front line. “””
Amen to that Bro. I passed on the Chemistry in high school; and I don’t have the sheepskin either; I opted for three years of field experience in Industry as a practising Physicist whose peer reviews consited of bosses who actually expected my stuff to work. And all the radiation Physics and every manner of thermal energy transport accompanied me for the first 50 years of that career. So I don’t know beans about why el Ninos or La Nina’s happen; but I bet that some how earth’s land/ocen geography somehow has something to do with it, and there are plenty of experts who do that stuff anyway.
But I know a photon when I see one; and I have been seeing them from down to, but not including DC, and all the way out to them thar Cosmetic rays; but I must admit to having ducked the X-ray spectrum, although I have a glancing knowledge of Laue patterns, that being somewhat useful in orienting III-V semiconductor Crystals.
I don’t know all I would like to know about the molecular spectroscopy, since I played hookey on the advanced and organic chemistry; but I did once teach Optics and Atomic Physics to University Freshmen; before departing Academia for the real world.
I’m on my second half century of industrial enterprise now, and no regrets about being a Physicist rather than an Engineer (no aspersions on engineers though).
So yes I’m quite confident I’m equipped to do accounting for the photons coming in and going out of this strange rock.
But I have no intention of getting involved in “Anomalies”, forcings” or “Climate sensitivities”; none of which appear in any of my Science Handbooks or anywhere in my listings of the SI sytstem of Units.
And in my University days; my Mathematics curriculum at least matched my Physics curriculum, giving me at least a double major degree; so I’m not hoodwinked by statistical ramblings that work just as well on totally unrelated telephone directory numbers, as they do on totally unrelated “temperature anomalies”; and have pretty much the same scientific significance.
George

Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change. At the same time, with only 34% of Americans saying they worry “a great deal” about the problem, most Americans do not view the issue in the same dire terms as the many prominent leaders advancing global warming as an issue.

One should have doubts about a pollster, even from an experienced organization like Gallup, when it doesn’t understand the difference between “debunking” and “correcting” the science (in reality, the political influence on science) behind climate change.” Half the results are in how the questions are asked.
“Science behind climate change” — now that’s a silly phrase in itself. Gallup needs a rational science advisor on this one.

from The Guardianhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/11/us-carbon-cuts
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said domestic political constraints made it impossible for the US president to announce ambitious short-term climate targets similar to those set by Europe. And he questioned the value of a new global climate deal without such a US pledge.
Speaking on the fringes of a high-level scientific conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Pachauri told the Guardian: “He [Obama] is not going to say by 2020 I’m going to reduce emissions by 30%. He’ll have a revolution on his hands. He has to do it step by step.”
Pachauri’s remarks echo those of Todd Stern, the US president’s new chief climate negotiator, who said last week that it was “not possible” for the US to aim for 25-40% cuts by 2020.

The older one is, the longer one has been around to know that it’s getting colder than it has been in quite some time. Those number of disbelievers in AGW will climb. Just wait until another year of poor Sunspots and pegged Cosmic Rays takes it’s toll.

My point about Galileo is that he was ridiculed by the authorities for having a different belief system, like Wegener.
A sane scientific environment welcomes dissent and out of the box thinking. Only madmen feel the need to silence intellectual dissent.

Cap the AGW hype and trade it in for 10 cords of firewood or a couple meghours of power to run the heater. Wonder what they will do to the perpetrators of the Climactic Ponzi scheme when the ice hits the fan?

The Gallup site had this to say in summary:
Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change. At the same time, with only 34% of Americans saying they worry “a great deal” about the problem, most Americans do not view the issue in the same dire terms as the many prominent leaders advancing global warming as an issue.
One should have doubts about a pollster, even from an experienced organization like Gallup, when it doesn’t understand the difference between “debunking” and “correcting” the science (in reality, the political influence on science) behind climate change.” Half the results are in how the questions are asked.
“Science behind climate change” — now that’s a silly phrase in itself. Gallup needs a rational science advisor on this one.

The meme is building: even the stupid child that is the average American can see that the “science” is “correct,” but he/she is too selfish/greedy/sinful to do the right thing.

“Mike N (17:25:42) :
Robinson:
“…Houses of Parliment under water.”
What a pleasant thought!”
Matters not what happens to pollies places of “work”, they’ll work around it. Here is a genuine example; The Beehive, as it’s called in Wellington, NZ, is the house of power and the base of Govn’t. The powers that be concluded that if in the event of a significant earthquake (You can actually get an impression of where one of the fault lines is when up on Mt Victoria hill lookout, looking north towards the Hutt valley), they’d move “Govn’t” to Melbourne, Australia.
We here in Australia have enough pollies of our own as it is.
PS. I’m a Pome, Kiwi and nearly an Aussie too.

Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change.
Well, I was at the conference, heard all of the stemwinder speeches, and attended as many of the seminars as time would allow.
Not one of them denied that Global Warming was real. Not one.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the scientists present believed in global warming at a much greater percentage than the American public.
They did indeed debunk much of the AGW science behind climate change, though.

evanmjones (18:02:46)
“In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the scientists present believed in global warming at a much greater percentage than the American public.
They did indeed debunk much of the AGW science behind climate change, though.”
I wasn’t there Mr J. but I suspect that you are spot on with both your conclusions!
I agree that the world has got warmer. Given its starting point in the mid-victorian era (end of the LHI) that has to be a comfort!
The debunking of the ‘Science’ by Science was a given from the start-It’s the timing of the debunking of the politics by the Science that worries me- ‘cos it still hasn’t happened!

@Myself (18:29:05)
“The debunking of the ‘Science’ by Science was a given from the start”
Before anyone attacks me on that statement, please allow me to attack myself!
I disagree totally. In fact I agreed, 100%, that the science, at that time, was non-debunkable! That I was wrong then as I was wrong with my above statement is attributable to the conceit of the 20/20 hindsight brigade of which I am a dishonourable member.
Let me now restate my position. “I thought that the case for Man Made Global Warming was unassailable at the time- I now understand that I was wrong”

Seriously, though, after reading ClimateAudit.org and RealClimate.org and some other blogs for about three years now, I can be 99.9999% certain in my own mind that much, if not most, of “climate science” is political pseudoscience, and is in fact the biggest farce and deceit that I have seen in my lifetime. It makes cold fusion look good, by comparison. I applaud the real scientists in the “field,” (if there really is one), who are practicing honest science. It is striking, scary, and sickening that almost none of them has any funding, especially government funding. My hat’s off and my prayers are with those brave souls!
Orwell was a very bright person.

The advantage that those us trained in the sciences have vs others in the realist camp is that we know not only that the alarmists are twisting science for political ends, but also how they are accomplishing the task.
My training as an economic geologist included a gawdawful amount of of PChem, too much of which was taken before I had mastered the math that I realized later should have been a prerequisite.
The most important academic training though was in how to think my way out out of paper bag. Something that no longer appears to be part of core curriculum.

DJ (13:30:28) : Can someone explain to me why sceptics are so fixated with public opinion.
Because it tells us how well we are doing at explaining the complete farce of AGW to everyone else. It informs us just how much the average joe and jane have got a clue.CC is a science debate
If only that were true… “AlGore’s Scary Movie V, revenge of Gaia”, is not exactly science; nor is “The Phantom Hokey Stick” nor is “Hansen and the Fictional Data – DIY Anomaly Fabrication!”
If it were about science, the fact that it’s all been down hill since 1998 and that every prediction (oops, pardon, make that projection, or construction, or fabrication, or… what ARE you calling computer fantasies these days?) has been wrong; well those would invalidate AGW. But since the hypothesis rolls on, it’s clearly about politics, not science.The laws of physics won’t change just because a group of non-experts have been confused by the misapplication of media norms.
And exactly which law of physics would that be? The one that says you can not make 1/100 degree accuracy out of 1 degree data? The one that says you can’t make 100 year trends out of 30 year history? The one that says you ought not to cherry pick your start date or your baseline? Hmmm?
The bottom line is really simple. It’s cold. It’s getting colder. People as a mob are pretty slow to catch on, but they are not that slow. The average joe is not buying this “junk” when their heating bill is going up, their radiator is frozen, and they are shoveling more “stuff” than you are.
Get it?
There is the wonderful thing called an “existence proof”; and Joe & Jane six pack are shoveling a lot of “existence proof” this winter; with more to come next winter, and for the next 20+ years given the PDO and barycenter action. So you’ve got maybe 1 year to make hay, then they are going to be taking that haymaker after you, the folks who sold them a bill of goods.
I’d feel sorry for you, but frankly, I learned a long time ago that the average joe was a pretty good guy to have a beer with; just don’t “Frank” around with him (OR her) because they (and me – I are one…) have a long memory for folks who did them wrong. NEVER forget that. They (and we, meaning me…) don’t forget it either…
So you are in the lead right now. Run with it while you can, but the 1st & 2nd derivative are against you; I’ve got “tools” to sharpen, in particular:http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/06/gistemp-start_here/
My analysis of the “polite fiction” that is GIStemp data.
I give it about another 1 year (2 years max) of ever more “stuff” being shoveled before Joe & Jane Six Pack decide that they were lied to by the AGW crowd and maybe they just ought to get a little political payback. Call it 2010 election? Works for me…

John Galt (13:34:49) : I recall reading about past ‘global crisis’. In previous decades, people were more concerned about basic survival. It’s a sign of our prosperity to believe we have the resources to fight a global problem.
Poor people are worried about getting through next week, or through next winter. Wealthy people are concerned about the environment and the distant future.
Ah yes, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
While I’d rearrange it some, the basic idea is sound.
The problem that Cap and Tirade has is that it works on somewhere up around “self actualization” while the average Joe & Jane are down near “Safety” or maybe “Belonging”… (And China is somewhere between “Physiological” and “Safety”…)
Don’t ever tell someone working on “Safety” that they need to do what you want so you can have your “Self Actualization”… What this implies for the next 4 years is interesting to contemplate…

Claude Harvey (13:46:31) : Contrary to my expectations, 57% of Americans can neither read a thermometer nor detect when they’re up to their behinds in snow and ice. The younger ones seem particularly oblivious;
My God Man! I think you’ve GOT IT! We just need to get the Moms of the world to dress Johnny and Janet in a bit too few layers and send them out to shovel the driveway!
BRILLIANT!
They will come, shivering and tired, into the kitchen muttering “Global Warming, My …” Assuming they are cold enough, they will have clue!

http://www.grist.org/news/2009/03/11/tax/index.html?source=twitter
From the above link we get this from James Hansen:
“If it’s going to be cap and trade, I’d rather nothing came out of Copenhagen. I’d rather take another year and two and get it right.”
What would work, he argues, is a direct tax — as close to the source as possible — on fossil fuels. “A carbon tax is the mechanism that allows you to make an international agreement globally effective in a short period of time,” he said.
[end]
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait…a…minute. I thought we didn’t have another year or two to “wait and get it right.” I mean, that’s what we get told all the time. If we don’t do something NOW, we’re all going to die from an overheated and exhausted planet. How many years now has it been that we’ve been told we have to do something? And exactly what has happened since then? By the way, if we do end up doing something and the Earth survives what then? Do the Greens get credit for what would have happened anyway? And if Earth gets warmer via natural processes, what then? Will we have to cut back even more, provided there is anything left to cut back on, in another push to “save the planet”? Apparently we have plenty of time as long as we are talking about following through on the flawed Green theolo..uh..ideology. But if we’re not, then suddenly it’s guns and thunder, and all hell is going to break lose in five seconds unless we all “do” something. Ha!

I have the image in my mind of DJ typing in his post, then putting his hands over his eyes, so as not to read any response to his post. He is firmly entrenched in his beliefs. There are none so blind, ……

Robinson (14:07:33) : The very organ that hosts Christopher Booker has posted another idiotic scientific prediction on rising sea levels, along with an oh so dramatic photograph of the Houses of Parliament under water!
Clicked the link, read the story. ZERO comments… Hmmm…. post a comment poking fun at the idea and pointing out the recent cold and snow. Nothing…
Now it could just be a bug… but it sure smelled like someone catching a raft of it from cold folks shoveling snow an deciding to just black hole the “feedback” 😉 LMAO…

“Phil’s Dad (16:31:22) :
The politics will change the split second those lines cross; but at the current rate that will not be for another eight years. ”
I suppose if documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle and Doomsday Called Off were shown on tv a few times the rate would speed up.

Looks like the BBC is coming to the party as well… at last an admission that temps are not going up anymore and that people are realizing this….Attacks by the AGW’s (who still believe) are looking rather ridiculous.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7929174.stm

Dorlomin (14:00:55) :
A country that gives the world a creationist museum with dinosaurs walking with Adam doesnt ‘believe’ in global warming.
Clearly Dorlomin, you haven’t been keeping up – all this was conclusively proved by Fred Flintstone and Dino, with no less credibility than the following statements by UK media, below.
My favorite:
“How to spot climate change deniers” – no doubt followed by instructions on how to stone these Climate Lepers, or “Clepers”…
Keep smiling all, Allan
darwin (14:02:52) :
Here’s the viewpoint of the UK media (all today 11 March 2009):
The Independent:
– Sea levels rising twice as fast as predicted
– Carbon cuts only give 50/50 chance of saving planet
-Deforestation: the hidden cause of global warming
The Guardian
– Amazon could shrink 85% due to climate change
– US carbon cuts could spark revolution
– Climate change transforming rainforests into major carbon emitters
– Warming may trigger carbon time bomb
– Climate crunch heralds end of history
– How to spot climate change deniers
– Stern: Climate change deniers are flat-earthers
And the impartial BBC
– Acidic seas fuel extinction fears
– Sea rise to exceed projections

Bobby Lane (21:00:18) :http://www.grist.org/news/2009/03/11/tax/index.html?source=twitter
From the above link we get this from James Hansen:
“If it’s going to be cap and trade, I’d rather nothing came out of Copenhagen. I’d rather take another year and two and get it right.”.
He believes, and it is true, that cap and trade will take too long for his alarm to sub bate .
I think that these people who believe that CO2 will be even diminished by taxing should be given a D on economics 101 and psychology 101. Unless a viable alternative energy source is put into effect in parallel and before any taxation the only thing that will happen with direct taxation is a hiccup, and with cap and trade the lining of Gore et al pckets and not even a hiccup in the CO2 climb. Unless the taxes are in real blood money.
This is evident for the amount of money we in Europe pay to use our cars 4 euro a gallon or so . Both the rich north and the poor south pay the money that is necessary to go from A to B. When it becomes more expensive, they cut out an outing, or delay buying a new coat. It has to become enormously more expensive to start walking and biking if you do not like walking and biking to work. A few hundred dollars will not do it.

Looking at the graph in the headline post, I think I see an anti-correlation with temperature, with a bit of lag due to media inertia.
I expect an unprecedented exponential runaway tipping point in sentiment will occur soon after cap and trade is enacted.

When I read the part where they said:
“Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change.”
Blood literally shot out of my eyes. This is such a distortion that I cannot even begin to explain how wrong it is. Ugh!!!

DJ (13:30:28) :
The laws of physics won’t change just because a group of non-experts have been confused by the misapplication of media norms.
The laws of physics won’t change because a clique of computer programmers have been confused by the misapplication of data and parameters either.

Well, here’s a comment from today’s Independent in the UK showing someone of the opposite opinion:
‘As I indicated just yesterday, there will be many more dire predictions that will have to be revised upwards as the situation rapidly worsens.
However I’n sure it will be ‘ Here we go again’; another opportunity for the so-called sceptics to tell us that carbon dioxide does not cause global warming (despite Tyndal and Ahrenius working that out well over a 100 years ago), another chance to say that the Earth is actually cooling (but if were to be warming, that would be due to a change in the Sun’s activity), another opportunity for them to say that a higher carbon dioxide level will be good for the planet because it would promote plant growth, a chance to say that telling the thruth is ‘being alarmist’, a chance for so-called sceptics to demand more research instead of action, and another opportunity for the ‘there is still time to act’ brigade to promote technologies that have been shunned for the past 40 years.
The idea of putting on a seat belt before driving a car or taking a life jacket on a trip in a small boat seems completely alien to a large section of the contributors to this forum and to all politiicans and business leaders.
The Precautionary Principle indicates: Don’t do it unless you sure its safe. The globalised consumer society says: Just keep doing it -keep burning oil and coal, keep adding CO2 and other poillutants to the atmosphere and keep degrading the entire world environment- until there is nothing left to burn and nothing left to trash.
It’s almost getting too surreal for words at this stage.’
Let’s get that straight:
1. They consider the sun to have no impact on our climate.
2. Despite that, carbon dioxide is a massive driver of it.
3. This was shown over 100 years ago (I’d appreciate comments on whether that is true or not and how that compares to contemporary thinking).
4. They have gone beyond the possibility that their view could possibly be wrong.
This was a story about ‘the decline of the Amazon being irreversible’. Well it is if we keep chopping it down and burning it.
I don’t think that has ANYTHING to do with solar energy. It has to do with the radiative balance of energy arriving at and leaving the earth’s surface.
And it won’t be changed by carbon capture technologies.

More character assassination and use of Holocaust language by the Guardian todayhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/12/climate-change-sceptic-environment
Instead of using the term ‘denier’ this time she uses the term ‘revisionists’, a reference to Holocaust deniers who attempt to revise history.
She also refuses to acknowledge or debate any of the science and resorts to this kind of racist and sexist banter:The contrast with the America embodied by Obama’s election is stark. The 600 attendees (by the organisers’ count) are almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age. Only two women and one African-American man figure on the programme of more than 70 speakers.
So that’s it then. If you’re white or old enough to have some experience of various matters you should get lost, sit at the back of the bus, or die even.
Wait, wouldn’t that apply to the community of alarmist scientists too?
She also makes continual references to Exxon-Mobil being a sponsor of skepticism, but fails to make any mention of how much money oil companies donate to various environmental causes and organisations.

Joe D’Aleo sums up the ICCC conference here:http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog
It doesn’t sound like any real media came out to cover it. I have yet to find a real report about it from Drudge, Fox, Washington Times or other major outlet. That’s really disappointing. So much for open debate.
The media ought be spit upon.

I am a new poster to this site but have been an ice watcher for the last couple of years. I am aware that there have been all kinds of problems with satelite sensors etc but over the last week NSIDC has indicated a huge reduction in ice extent. Has anyone any idea what has gone wrong with the images at http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/daily.html there seems to be a problem around the Gulf of St Lawrence. I am sorry if this has been mentioned before and I have just missed the comments.

I’m not sure if some of the people that have commented were kidding or not but if they aren’t then all I have to say is who let the global-warmer flood gates open? I’ve never seen so many anti-global warming denier haters in one comment section!

They had a pefectly good agenda on cleaning up the environment, superfunds sites, etc.
We had the really bad examples of Communist countries as to what we didn’t want our nation to end up looking and smelling like.
We were making progress.
That wasn’t good enough, no, they had to come up with AGW. Ban Energy. Make it too expensive. Perform Frankenstein Doomsday Experiments on the climate.
Every day, another 10,000 step out into the cold reality of a cooling planet and get thier minds changed for them. It’s hard to swallow the fanatical hype when your face feels like dried plaster in the refrigerator. It’s hard to maintain the thought of frying heat when you are suffering with January temps in March.

Allan M R McRae, apparently you failed miserably in noticing that all of the statements about global warming are filled to the brim with could, should, maybe, might, possibility, etc. Scientist who are not confident in their predictions do not deserve to be scientist at all as they are the ones that create a global hoax like this one.

DJ –
100 years ago, everyone knew the world was the center of the universe.
Alfred Wegener came up with the idea of plate tectonics, and no one believed him for 45 years.
When Einstein came up with the General relativity, and it was based on the idea our Galaxy was the whole universe, and a static universe. No expansion.
Everyone in science who says “All scientists agree, and you should too” should be treated skeptically.
Skeptics of the given paradigm are where science gets done.

Rhys, it was John Tyndall, and Svante Arrhenius.http://www.manhattanrarebooks-science.com/tyndall.htm
Remember the greenhouse effect is quite clear. We should have seem as much or more warming in the troposphere, but we haven’t. So as far as Tyndall is correct, it is also not the warming effect we are seeing.

Seems to me that WUWT (in general) and Watt’s devotees (in particular) are leaving themselves little ‘wriggle’ room. No wonder this blog site is seen as the epiphany of the close-mindedness of the deny and delay crowd.
I’m outa here.

The best comparison to this is the theory that man arrived in the America’s at the end of the last ice age. This was discredited by overwelming physical eveidence yet the scientific fought for years to discredit the scientists that had proved the theory invalid.
And I won’t even mention the two bicycle mechanics from Ohio that figured out how to make a plane fly, while the worlds greatest scientists with the full backing of the governments money could not.

Well…seems like it’s time for another round of “Feed the Troll” this morning.
DJ, no one has to publish a paper to disprove man-made global warming. Not a single paper. The burden of proof is entirely on the pro-AGW side, period. That is the group that is making the claims, and that is the group that must prove these claims. The fact that you say that Col. Mustard did it in the library with the knife does NOT mean that I have to prove that Col. Mustard did it in the kitchen with a gun. What it DOES mean is that you have to prove that A) Col. Mustard was in the library, plus B) Col. Mustard had a knife, WHILE he was IN the library, and C) Col. Mustard used the knife to commit the murder. If you can’t prove all three of those things…the good Col. Mustard is a free and innocent man.
I don’t know how to make this any more simple for you folks over there.
And for “The idea of putting on a seat belt before driving a car or taking a life jacket on a trip in a small boat seems completely alien to a large section of the contributors to this forum and to all politiicans and business leaders.”…
This argument is pure folly, as it never recognizes the tremendous HARM being done to entire populations as a result of the actions the person making this argument says we must take. Its always presented from the “Well…there’s no harm in doing this now…we should ALWAYS wear a seat belt.” This particular seat belt is incredibly harmful to the people that will be swept into or maintained in horific levels of poverty, who are denied energy to produce and store food. So stop with the sanctimonious youidiotswontevenwearaseatbelt-crap.
/rant off
/troll food stored
JimB

timetochooseagain (13:45:29) :
…More over, evidently you are totally ignorant of the masses of papers which seriously question some of the major assumptions behind alarmist AGW theories….
Exactly, the writing criticise others research they add nothing to the debate – no new evidence that AGW is false.
Any AGW “evidence” put up for debate is always battered with the same “its cyclical just wait and see” the trouble is it will be too late if we wait.Mike Strong (15:19:29) :
We’ll be taxed and our lifestyles will be changed long before the debate is settled and all the science is in. Then what are the governments gonna do if the AGW theory is wrong? You think they will give me a CO2-tax rebate?
You must already know that the California Air Resources Board is already making changes to car emissions standards based upon the “science” of global warming. Soon we will all be driving those tiny Smart cars. They even proposed taxing us on how many miles we drive each year and tax us proportionally to the CO2 emissions …
So it is OK for you to consume without thought for the future. “i’m all right, jack – let the future look after itself, they’ll think of something” Oil is a limited resource. If Europeans can get 60mpg out of a modern standard family petrol/deisel car and get comfortably from A to B why cannot you Americans? We own a 7 seater petrol vehicle built 13 years ago. Even this gets 38mpg mixed driving.
To drive drive a SUV (10mpg?) to work is just pain nuts.
Mike

DavidK – I don’t see a previous post by you to have “paraphrased” anything.
Also, what part of my “guff” do you disagree with? John Tyndall having 2 l’s in his last name? or the historical record of consensus science? because there are at least a dozen areas of science I can come up with off the top of my head on that. Biology, medicine, chemistry, everywhere you look, science is not changed by mass consensus, but by unique perspectives, and great minds challenging the paradigm.
To be honest I am likely one of the most open minded people you will meet. I also challenge the idea of the Big Bang, and certainly string theory. Yes I understand the math, and no it does not work. Making up a matter you can’t see, test for, measure, or even theoretically quantify, then making up an energy to do likewise is not science, and takes more faith than any religion I know of.
Theories based, on untestable theories, based on a theory, about a theory that is untested, is highly theoretical.

All I keep coming back to is the ICE of 1977, they were wrong than, they are wrong now. I have no idea what the agenda is, I guess world control of money and domination of policy. We may end up in another world war at some point. Japan, China and India could care less about CO2. I doubt that the Middle East wants the world to stop using oil. Germany is increasing it’s usage of Coal.

DJ (13:30:28) :
“Can someone explain to me why sceptics are so fixated with public opinion. CC is a science debate – well it would be if the sceptics ever got around to publishing science papers. ”
Because those of us who are professional scientists but who don’t have a financial stake in the AGW story are concerned that policy decisions are being made that are directly contraindicated by the very “science ” they pretend is the basis of those decisions. Further in a Republic, such as this one, if the alarmists can convince enough of the populace to allow their policies to be implemented than reality doesn’t count and we go merrily the wrong direction while the economy goes down the tubes with the catastrophic human and environmental consequences that always accompany economic hardship.
Putting it simply; millions of real people die and the environment is permanently harmed because of the AGW political agenda when the catastrophic AGW idea is directly contradicted by the very “Physics” you imply supports that agenda.
“The laws of physics won’t change just because a group of non-experts have been confused by the misapplication of media norms.”
Correct, the laws of Physics don’t change, usually; at this point unless new physical laws are discovered or old ones disproved the idea of catastrophic warming due to carbon dioxide increase is dead.

DavidK:“Seems to me that WUWT (in general) and Watt’s devotees (in particular) are leaving themselves little ‘wriggle’ room. No wonder this blog site is seen as the epiphany of the close-mindedness of the deny and delay crowd.”
I dont know. Seems to me that it’s the alarmist camp that has, (and continues to), paint itself into a corner. How many “tipping points” and planted stories of some looming ecologic disaster (happening faster than predicted) can you play amidst record snow storms?
I understand you guys being far too invested in the hoax to back out. I mean, after all, this really isnt about climate is it? If you lose public opinion and people perceive you are deliberately perpetrating a fraud to further a political agenda, it’s going to get pretty ugly out there.
Climate alarmism is a bad house of cards, but I do enjoy the occasional hyperbole. Bring on the “death trains”. That’s always good for a smile.

I am having a real problem with these photos of coastal urban centers inundated with meters of melted ice water from AGW, as if we are going to stand by for 50 years in some passive daze as the water creeps into our buildings or we’re going to wake up one morning like Rip Van Winkle up to our necks in water.
I am not a believer in catastrophic AGW but I am aware that there is at least a possibility that significant natural global warming could occur during the next century which may cause significant sea level rise. I wonder if we are investigating how to deal with this possibility? The Netherlands has 2000 years of experience with this problem.

now this is great…add another scary compound to the list of culprits!
I’m getting pretty tired of seeing stuff like this….
New greenhouse gas discovered: Sulfuryl fluoride, 4800x worse than CO2http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/41702/178/
maybe this stuff can help us avert the coming ice age! LOL

Back to topic, one thing that pleasingly stands out is that 57% of people belive that the reports of effects of global warming are either correct or Underestimated. As said in the arcticle “Americans generally believe global warming is real. That sets the U.S. public apart from the global-warming skeptics who assembled this week in New York City to try to debunk the science behind climate change. “.
Considering in many parts of the US there has been a relatively cold winter it is heartening to know that people seem to generally understand the difference between weather and climate. One would have expected that many more people would be in doubt.
Maybe many of them are looking at the subject from all angles and wondering that, if PDo has switched to -ive for a while, we are now in La Nina conditions (though not an event as yet) and the sun is in a prolonged solar minimum, they must be wondering ‘Where is the global cooling many of the WUWT people have been talking about’? It is reassuring to know that the general public appreciate that the global warming is masking these effects (be honest, you do realise in your heart that global temperatures should be falling rapidly, unless you are of the 66% mentioned in the arcticle 😉 ) and unlike the ostrich scepics hope that governments and industry work together to try and resolve the problem.
God bless the American people!

Shawn Whelan (05:11:49) :
The problem with your assertion is the statement that there was “overwhelming physical evidence” to support the new hypothesis.
The truth is that there was a lot of information that “suggested” the old hypothesis needed to be revised or replaced and it took decades of field research to firmly establish this as “evidence”.
Prior to the AGW scare that began in the 1980’s it was fairly well established that the sun was the principal driver of climate. There were other ideas out there, but the weight of evidence was stronger for solar domination.
For the past 20-odd years we have been bombarded by a lot new information – primarily derived from climate models – that have suggested a different mechanism (CO2) has an important, and possibly critical, role in controlling climate.
So far, at least outside the models, the CO2 hypothesis has not presented a compelling case that would justify abandoning the well established solar connection.
This does not mean that CO2 has no role in climate. It just means that its role has not been satisfactorily defined and quantified to the degree that would allow honest scientists to claim its role is either established or critical.

schnurrp (05:53:01) :
I am not a believer in catastrophic AGW but I am aware that there is at least a possibility that significant natural global warming could occur during the next century which may cause significant sea level rise. I wonder if we are investigating how to deal with this possibility? The Netherlands has 2000 years of experience with this problem.
The powers that be know that building sea defenses is a waste of time and effort. They also know that moving infrastructure further inland is beyond budget. Taxing co2 emissions is a lucrative alternative to doing anything practical, and gives the appearance of tackling a ‘root cause’. The media hooha and pro vs anti AGW debate nicely draws attention away from the fact that adaption isn’t being facilitated or addressed.
It’s a classic political cop-out/taxation hike.

Thanks for another cracking thread here! especially thanks to E M Smith, BillBodell, Aron, and Roy fOMR.
I was nauseated and ashamed by Monboit’s latest “How to spot a CC denier”, that was mentioned here. Interesting thing is, he says Monckton’s science had been falsified whereas the opposite was what happened, and the Guardian had to print a retraction to Monbiot’s stuff (Monbiot was doffing his cap to Gavin Schmidt as the authority). So Monbiot is – well well – in denial of this memory. See my Primer on this interesting and IMO rather vital story.
However, the good news is that the comments were hot off the mark in saying what rot, with quite a bit of intelligence at times.

Somewhat OT:
Fred Singer will be at an “open meeting at Harvard (at 8PM in Sever 203) on March 12.” Sever Hall is in the Harvard Yard.
I don’t know what sort of ‘open meeting’ this will be, nor whether there has been any publicity, but I hope to be there, and would urge any readers of this blog in the Boston area to attend as well.
Could a moderator give this announcement any more prominence? Many who might be interested won’t see it buried down in this long thread.
/Mr Lynn

@ Shawn Whelan
I am already aware of all the WUWT threads on the subject and the oyher sites you mention. (Thanks) But since the March article with Walt Meier I had thought that now that images were back on line, that the data was correct. The point I was making was that there seems to be a big problem with the mask. The USA seems to have carried out large scale land reclammation over night.

I would like to point out a pattern in the poll that hasn’t been mentioned. The skepticism previously peeked in 2004, ann election year. To me that means that some of the responses to the poll are politically motivated.

Lord Monckton was an advisor to Thatchers government (and a newspaper man).
According to Lawson (her Chancellor) in “The Great Global Warming Swindle” she poured the first millions into Carbon AGW in an effort to gain energy independence from the Middle East – get more nuclear power – defeat the miners – and bash CND.
I’m not surprised that the ICCC was no covered.

thefordprefect (05:25:33) :
Any AGW “evidence” put up for debate is always battered with the same “its cyclical just wait and see” the trouble is it will be too late if we wait.
I’ve been hearing that since this theory was proposed, “the situation is too dire, we can’t wait for evidence”. Reminds me of getting rushed at a used car dealership, “We’ll discount it now, but you have to buy RIGHT NOW.” Some of us are not fooled by such tactics. Show me. Don’t spin tales of possible tragedy… show me. Make predictions that work. Many AGW predictions made from the 80s onwards have had time to fail… and they have.
Proof. Not chicken-little alarmism. Proof, please.
Meanwhile we have counter-proof. Ten years of cooling/no rise in global temps, seas NOT rising rapidly, oceanographers projecting 30 more years of cooling. When does weather become climate again? How much counter-proof is necessary to prove a negative?So it is OK for you to consume without thought for the future.
Yes. I can even breathe out CO2 without wondering if I should kill myself.
…and that’s where these alarmist policies seem to be heading. Death. Cap and trade and taxes causing skyrocketing energy costs, causing the poor to freeze to death in ever-harsher winters.

The graph in last year’s Gallup poll article, not shown in this year’s article, “% saying the effects of GW has already begun” shows 1998 Democrats 46% Republicans 47%; 2008 Democrats 76% Republicans 41%. An extraordinary divergence.
What happened to spike opinions in the years 2004 and 1999?
Most revealing to me is the sudden uptick of the “Independent” percentage saying “news of GW is exaggerated” from 33% last year to 44% this year. Could we be seeing a Hockey Stick starting to form????????

From the link Paul C gave: Crisis? What crisis?It seems pertinent to retort that last Wednesday, the debating society of St Andrews University debated the motion “This house believes global warming is a global crisis”. It was defeated.
We won on “truth”, and climate realists always would win on “truth” in an open debate.
This demonstrates what can happen when people – including those in Scotland – are exposed to both sides of the global warming debate.
RICHARD S COURTNEY
Longfield
Falmouth, Cornwall
Way to go, Richard!
This is why they refuse to debate. They know their “science” is weak, and they have to rely on appeals to authority (IPCC, Hansen, etc.), and on the much-vaunted “consensus”.
I do hope there will be a video of the debate.
DavidK (04:54:58) :No wonder this blog site is seen as the epiphany of the close-mindedness of the deny and delay crowd.
I’m outa here.
Ta-ta, AGWer troll. You and your ilk are obviously not interested in science. “The debate is over” after all, right?
I believe the word you wanted, in your haste to hurl your AGW-inspired invective here and run was “epitome”.
An epiphany would be what you might have (and perhaps, miraculously someday will) if you were to awaken from your AGW-induced intellectual sleep and realized that all that you thought you “knew” about C02, and man’s effect on climate was in fact completely false.

“thefordprefect”: “Exactly, the writing criticise others research they add nothing to the debate – no new evidence that AGW is false.
Any AGW “evidence” put up for debate is always battered with the same “its cyclical just wait and see” the trouble is it will be too late if we wait.”
Evidently you a) like to totally distort and fail to understand what I said and b) have no clue how science works. First off, it is not “criticizing other’s research” which I was referring to (though there is a lot of garbage out there) but in fact presenting arguments that the evidence of claim AGW is weak and based on nothing more than an absence of alternative explanation, which no longer holds water anyway, and that things which other studies take for granted are unfounded assumptions. I don’t know who or where you “debate” or see debates, but arguments against AGW are much more than “its cyclical just wait and see”. And, as far as not having time to wait, perhaps you could present one policy-just one-that would make a dent in AGW while still allowing society to meet growing energy demand? Oh, you can’t, because no such policy exists. Tough luck for you.

I personally believe that the burning of fossil fuels such as coal are one of the only real things that mankind has done to benefit the earth as a whole. The total amount of available carbon and biomass on the surface of the earth has shrunk dramatically since the Carboniferous, Jurrasic and Triasic epochs. Billions of tons of carbon have been buried in the earth and lost to the surface, and as a result the total biomass of the earth is smaller than it once was.
Mankind has been liberating some of that lost carbon back to the atmosphere and surface of the earth, making it available once again for life to utilize. This will increase the biomass of the surface and allow life to last longer than it otherwise would have. Volcanism is the only other real source of C02 restoration to the surface, and over time volcanism is slowing down as the earth’s core cools. The was a lot more volcanism during the carboniferous epoch, which was why there was so much more carbon available.
I find it ironic that carbon based lifeforms would go around spouting non-sense about their “carbon footprint” and worrying about carbon emissions, when in fact they wouldn’t even exist without that very carbon they fret about.

glen martin (06:29:43) :
I would like to point out a pattern in the poll that hasn’t been mentioned. The skepticism previously peeked in 2004, ann election year. To me that means that some of the responses to the poll are politically motivated.

There is no indication of peaks in 2000 or 2008, so how is that a pattern?

In my opinion the movement in the polls from “underestimated” to “exaggerated” is simply media vs. practical experience and our practical experience of current weather is beginning to win out. If 2009+ temps jump up movement will probably reverse. People are too preoccupied to delve deeply into the science of climate change but the experience of weather cannot be avoided.
OT: I am not a scientist but I have tried to read some of the scientific papers on both sides of the AGW question. Generally, can you use computer model results to test a scientific hypothesis in the classical sense? What is the role of computer models in science?

In response to the comments about Galileo’s trial. Watch the programme on it from “100 days that shook the world” series.
It amazed me the legal points that were made. That the Church tried to go through all legal procedures. That Galileo thought he would be able to defend himself successfully on legal points.
Only at the end did the Pope insist on a result for his political reasons: as he was under attack for being too liberal and not opposing the Protestant countries sufficiently. He was under threat of impeachment and could not countenance being seen to give in to such an attack as Galileo’s. Esp as it was a very personal attack on him in terms of the character Simplicio.
The Church comes out of it badly. They did threaten torture. But many would be surprised at the legal procedings they went through.
Also, the argument was not as straight forward as people now believe. If you read Arthur Koestler’s book The Sleepwalkers, you will see that Copernicus’s system did not simplify anything. It involved more epicycles than the Ptolemaic system. But just as people accepted Millikan’s results for the charge on the electron, because they thought it should be so, the Heliocentric system began to be accepted in some circles(no pun intended) but was not notably superior until Galileo started to show evidence of Phases of Venus etc. It had until this time been perfectly reasonable to believe in a Geocentric system.

Unfortunately, scientific data no longer matters in this issue. The political momentum and blind ideology behind the AGW train is too great. And we may have more to fear from this new religion than opressive taxation. Last year in Seattle we had incidents of Luxury SUVs vandalized as they sat parked on the street. There is some risk this could spiral into an oppressive regime such as those we have witnessed in germany and vietnam…. making it more important than ever to protest loudly and often at every incident that perpetuates the AGW fantasy.

Just come back from lunch break at work, and they have posters all over the walls here about the WWF Climate Change Earth Hour, made me instantly angry. Shall I risk my job and tear all these things down?

Mary Hinge (06:01:58) : Back to topic, one thing that pleasingly stands out is that 57% of people belive that the reports of effects of global warming are either correct or Underestimated. … Considering in many parts of the US there has been a relatively cold winter it is heartening to know that people seem to generally understand the difference between weather and climate
Considering the all-out campaign and constant media attention on AGW/GW and next to zero otherwise, it’s amazing that 41% have come to the conclusion that GW is over-hyped. I wonder how they got that idea.

Mary Hinge (06:01:58) :
“… if PDo has switched to -ive for a while, we are now in La Nina conditions (though not an event as yet) and the sun is in a prolonged solar minimum, they must be wondering ‘Where is the global cooling many of the WUWT people have been talking about’? It is reassuring to know that the general public appreciate that the global warming is masking these effects…”
It’s in the pipeline. No, seriously I am wondering how the AGW scientists missed these important negative forcings. Correct prediction of the natural climate forces is the basis for correct prediction by the AGW climate models, isn’t it?

All the delegates at the climate change conference in Copenhagen is on their way home – and it’s snowing outside the conference center 🙂
Not unusual march weather in Copenhagen – but every Dane I know is longing for spring by now.

This is fascinating, considering the extent to which mainstream media and education systems treat AGW as a settled science. In fact, most consider reporting on the skeptic side to be socially irresponsible.
Hopefully our policy makers are getting the message.

Paul Schnurr (07:26:33) : Generally, can you use computer model results to test a scientific hypothesis in the classical sense? What is the role of computer models in science?Model and Hypothesis are synonymous words although Model carries a mathematical connotation. The only genuine test is to collect more data and show how accurately the model/hypothesis predicts them. A computer model is nothing more than a mathematical model on steroids.

Ryan C (08:06:50) : … they have posters all over the walls here about the WWF Climate Change Earth Hour, made me instantly angry. Shall I risk my job and tear all these things down?
Absolutely not. If they were Heartland posters would it be OK if they were torn down? Why not go and see if you can make a difference? Good luck.

Suzanne Goldenberg’s description of the ICCC demographics would also be equally accurate for the IPCC.
The demographic would include Hansen, Gore and even Obama to some extent.
Suzanne deliberately used language that subliminally conjures up images of aged imperialists like King George and the archetypal Hollywood villains like the Smoking Man from The X Files. She basically performed racial stereotyping – all aged white men are villains.
Michael Moore has attempted the same thing often, as we know. Stupid White Men was his blatantly racist view of corporate America. Then look at the shameful way he attempted to make Charlton Heston (who walked side by side with Martin Luther King to Capitol Hill) out to be a racist.
Maybe in the movies all villains are old white men but in real life that same demographic has been the most inventive, forward thinking, modernist, created more prosperity and spread more wealth around the world than any other demographic in the history of humanity. Think of the Founding Fathers of the United States, Edison, Watt, Newton, Dawkins, Hawking, etc.
The Enlightenment the Industrial Revolution were movements that old white men began and now there are people using faux-science, racism, subversion and ad hominem attacks to end it. The Guardian is one of the main purveyors of that.
At the heart of this attack on aged white men is the belief that they represent capitalism and an advancement away from Mother Nature. That’s why environmentalists romanticise African peasant life (poor, subject to disease, high child mortality) and seek to keep black people poor. They don’t want Africans to live like an Einstein or a Heston. They don’t want democracy or capitalism for Africans. They don’t want Africans to use their coal or oil.
For more foolery from the Guardian, today they have an article about how a whole region of the Sahara can be covered with solar panels to provide electricity for Europe. Yes, you read right – Europe. Forget about Africans doing it for themselves! The article fails to mention how much it would cost to install and maintain (the Sahara’s sands would render the panels useless every two days and you can’t expect people to run around in that kind of heat cleaning panels!).
Another example of how crude the Guardian is, a couple of weeks ago they ran an article during the trial of the four owners of The Pirate Bay. The Guardian journalist ended by saying something like ‘this trial is about four young punks sticking it to the big guy!’.
Again the journalist was female and the target was male. The ‘big guy’ in question was supposed to mean a grey haired, suited old white man in an office of some major corporation. What the Guardian writer failed to work out is that The Pirate Bay is financed by an old man (not young punk) so far to the right that he was kicked out of Sweden’s most Far-Right party for being too extreme. The same man is a multi-millionaire anti-Semite whose motive for spreading piracy was to “bring down Jewish businesses”, by which he meant film and record companies.
That’s the Guardian – quality journalism. Written by schmucks for gullible twenty somethings.Reply: Ok, can we get away from tangential politics and get back to topic please? ~ charles the moderator

Global Warming is currently politically correct.
But it will not be politically correct forever.
It will get chilled out in the same manner that Ice Age Coming was cooked out.
Climate has a way of scouring trashy beliefs, and it makes victims out of the mistaken.

annav (23:36:26):
Yes, I know he does. What we want is often what we end up believing because it will give us what we want. That is one common characterization of invented religions. In his case, is so common with the Greens, they want a quick and easy global solution. Nevermind that any such tax system will massively distort markets, increase prices, and further oppress every level of society but particularly the poor who will have to be compensated by welfare systems thus increasing taxes on the wealthier. It is a feedback loop once certain perameters, like cap-and-trade or a direct carbon tax, are erected. As I keep up with European politics rather well – yes, something I know you would not expect from an American – I understand the whole cap-and-trade scheme. It is as much fool’s dream as much as anything Gore, Hansen, et al. will dream up to impose on this side of the Atlantic. And it favors those with wealth and power, which certainly is not the spirit of democracy.
[snip]Reply: I’m sorry, I had to ponder that one, but that last paragraph just went too far. This is not Townhall or Daily Kos and we don’t want it to be. ~ charles the moderator

Paul Schnurr (07:26:33) : Generally, can you use computer model results to test a scientific hypothesis in the classical sense? What is the role of computer models in science?

No, computer model results are not facts and aren’t even data. A model does not really test an hypothesis.
As DAV noted, a model is an hypothesis. A model represents how the model creator believes a natural process works. Models have many purposes, such as learning how a system may or may not work and how parts of the system interact.
Computer climate models have many limitations. Perhaps the biggest limitation is our actual understanding of the climate system. Other limitations are computing power, lack of reliable data (including reliance upon estimates for much of the data used) and lack of ability to test the models against the real world, just to name a few.

A reply comment to thefordprefect (05:25:33) who said : “So it is OK for you to consume without thought for the future. ‘i’m all right, jack – let the future look after itself, they’ll think of something’. Oil is a limited resource. If Europeans can get 60mpg out of a modern standard family petrol/deisel car and get comfortably from A to B why cannot you Americans? We own a 7 seater petrol vehicle built 13 years ago. Even this gets 38mpg mixed driving. To drive drive a SUV (10mpg?) to work is just pain nuts.”
My reply: I did’t say we shouldn’t conserve. Those of us in California with brains are pretty anal when it comes to conservation. I have driven small cars for 30 years (mostly Hondas and Mazdas at 20-30 MPG)…mostly to save money… I also have CFL lighting in me ENTIRE house…mostly to save money. And my kids haul all the bottles and cans to the recycling place every couple months…mostly to get back money on the deposit.
I am all for keeping the planet clean and green. But I think what most of the skeptics in this blog are so tenacious about is the fact that as engineers and scientists we need to be as unbiased as possible. It is the entire reason we went to school, kept our lab notebooks full of documented findings and tested our theories …only to be peer reviewed time after time. It is when people like Gore, and Hansen and the politically motivated IPCC act like megalomaniacs to get their names in the newspaper over fear mongering is what we resent vehemently.
As for all those people who bought the large SUVs at 10 MPG with their monster tires…ha! I agree with you, it’s nuts unless they haul boats or do contracting work with large equipment. But that has nothing to do with the cyclic Artic icecap melting in 2007.

I’m sorry Charles (the moderator) but there is the issue of demographics in this whole debate about global warming and that also plays a part in Gallup polls. There shouldn’t be any mention of racial backgrounds, political alignment or any use of Holocaust imagery, but radical environmentalists have made it so that if you ever doubt anything they say or their actions then you must be crazy, or old, or Rightwing, or equal to a Holocaust denier, or religiously backwards, a criminal, and so on. The Guardian has been ramping up their hate campaign and it must be noted that this whole debate is not just about science.

RE: Computer models
Programmers have been trying for years to simulate the experience of driving a car and still aren’t able to do so. Yet the simulation of a car is far simpler that a non-linear chaotic system such as the Earth’s climate which has innumerable influences (subterranean, terrestrial, and extra-terrestrial) bearing upon it that are largely not understood yet.

I know this is merely’Weather’ but I wonder if Gallup should’ve asked the
folks in Meacham, Oregon,their low this am was-9F. yeaterday it was -11F.
previous lows were 2&3 F respectivley-in 2006! We are not warming….

Mary Hinge (09:15:22)
Hmm… about a 3.2 millimeter rise per year. And the trend since 2005 is flat or falling. Let’s see… Newport Beach, CA is 5 feet above sea level, so at current rates the town will need to be evacuated in say, 476 years or the year 2456. Looks like we’ll have time to evacuate.
And if you look at the trend since 1870, the rise has been slow and nearly constant.Temperature + Sea Level for NYC

Fernando (16:04:29) :
Global warming and Galileo:http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/03/global_warming_and_galileo.html
While Mr. Duke apologizes for the Church and attempts to portray Galileo as an irascible bully – he was not. Nor could he have bullied a Church that used the Inquisition as an instrument of social order. What Duke fails to mention is the fact that Pope Urban himself had given Galileo permission to publish his book “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” He was urged to portray heliocentricity as a theory.
All things of science in the 1600s were far from mainstream or common knowledge. Certainly the astronomical theory of heliocentricity cannot be likened to a raving bandwagon such as global warming today. While Mr. Duke’s defense of the Church is admirable – it was the Church that forced a good scientist to sign an onerous recantation. And it was the Church that locked him in prison even after doing so. To the vast credit of the present Church is the Pope’s comment that global warming is little more than a political agenda. And John Paul II did apologize to Galileo some 400 years after the fact.

timetochooseagain (07:06:41) :
First off, it is not “criticizing other’s research” which I was referring to (though there is a lot of garbage out there) but in fact presenting arguments that the evidence of claim AGW is weak and based on nothing more than an absence of alternative explanation,
I can present you with the Central England Temperature going back to 1600s(?) which shows the temp rise starting in 20th Cent. I can show you Grape harvest times that correlate well with CET that extend this back to 1300s. I can show you many temperatures going back to 1700s that correlate with CET
The CET is adjusted for UHI and other changes. But of course the grape harvest is a proxy and the other temperatures do not have UHI removed as far as I know.
This is the limit of available knowledge – there is no other way of going back beyond 1600s without proxies and you know what you say about proxies.
There is ice-on ice-off dates. There is snow dates. There are greening dates. there are glacier volume and length measurements. Most show the effects of a warming planet. Would you agree that these are indicators of GW?
I have plots of sea levels from 1800s (Brest,France) and many from the rest of the world 1900s that show a similar sea level increase starting in 1920s and slowing in 2000s. Is this another example of GW?
Arctic ice IS disappearing. Is this GW?
Most people agree that 1.3degC is a temperature rise that will occur if CO2 doubles. Do you disagree with this figure? Will you tell me why scientifically this is incorrect?
I.3C is not much but then this causes methane clathrates to be released and the air to become more humid. All adding to this temperature.
I do not see how this AGW can be prooved until it happens. Thus it will be too late. perhaps you could present one policy-just one-that would make a dent in AGW while still allowing society to meet growing energy demand? Oh, you can’t, because no such policy exists. Tough luck for you.
I will at least be able to face my children when they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say, “I tried”.
And if I am wrong I will be again able to say to my children that the world is a cleaner place because of the actions we unecessarily took.
This is much better than burying my head in the sand and hoping it will all go away.
Mike

AKD (17:54:20)
“The meme is building: even the stupid child that is the average American can see that the “science” is “correct,” but he/she is too selfish/greedy/sinful to do the right thing.”
Hey AKD, I’m working on my 70’s activist street cred. Can you help me out with the correct use of “meme” vs “canard”? What exactly is the difference? Are comments by “shills” always considered to be canards or could they also be called memes?

Global warming ranks dead last in a list of national priorities, according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the Public & the Press. The Americans polled rank the economy, unemployment, and terrorism as (respectively) the top three priorities that need to be addressed.

Now follow my logic, or lack thereof. AGW is real, deal with it. However AGC is also real. First we were burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere with CO2 causing a horrific warming of the planet, raising of the seas, catastrophic storms, earthquakes and talk radio. However there has been a pause in AGW over the past decade. The reason for this is Athropogenic Global Cooling. This new competing plague upon Mother Earth is being caused by the rapid increase in space junk circling the planet outside the atmosphere. Space junk is simply reflecting energy that would have otherwise reached and warmed the planet. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Hey where’s the spell Czech??

Mary Hinge (09:15:22) : Your reply to David Corcoran (06:04:33) about the sea level rise. i.e. “Really? Have you looked at the latest global mean sea level graphs? http://sealevel.colorado.edu/”
Can you educate me a bit without my having to go the entire site to find out how they did their calculations. I looked at the chart. It shows a trend line from 1992-2008 of ocean levels rising at 3.3 mm per year. This is about 2 inches in the past 16 years.
Questions:
1. Why does the chart start out at -30mm? To do this, I assume they are taking the 16 year average (1992-now) and plotting the trend based upon the average (mean)?
2. Data from satellites in orbit can be adjusted for orbital decay, ionosphere and troposhere skew, etc. But does the sea level data take into account of the nutation of the Earth?… whereby the satellite may be measuring sea level at a certain assumed datum(s) at a certain time of day, but the earth shifts in an 18 year cycle with respect to the satellite orbit. From Wikipedia: “The nutation of a planet happens because the tidal forces which cause the precession of the equinoxes vary over time so that the speed of precession is not constant. The principal term of nutation is due to the regression of the moon’s nodal line and has the same period of 6798 days (18.6 years). It reaches 17″ in longitude and 9″ in obliquity.”
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutation
I think my point is that in order to measure sea level with accuracy from a satellite, the places below being measured can not shift, and the moon and sun (which cause tidal action) need to be in the exact same spot, distance and time as when you did the previous measurement AND then one must compensate for the Earth’s nutational shift over its 18 year cycle.
Bottom line is: are all their variables compensated for ? i.e. eliptical orbit around the sun, moon influence, time of day, nutation, ionosphere and troposphere distortions (which vary with time of day, sun spot activity, etc.)
The reason why I am asking this is because I am presently working with some well-known Phd-types, who do GPS systems to centimeter accuracy, which is pretty darn tough to do even with fancy Kalman filtering and SASM receivers. I just can’t beleive that satellites launched 16 years ago, before the technology was mature on such measurements…how they can get down to the millimeter level when we are having a tough time getting measurements to the centimeter level. And I am not trying to be cynical. I am open to being educated on how they do it.

Mary Hinge (06:01:58) : “Maybe many of them are looking at the subject from all angles and wondering that, if PDo has switched to -ive for a while, we are now in La Nina conditions (though not an event as yet)…”
That’s a joke, right? I suspect 99% of the survey respondants wouldn’t have a clue to what that means.

Tallbloke thanks a lot for that bit of work. I’ll try to incorporate it, plus the post-2002 graph showing the correlation still fits. Interesting thing is, Ed had a point too – why does the CO2 shoot up from 2002 on? Personally I think the capacity of the seas and biosphere to absorb CO2 is still so huge compared with our output that I doubt it’s China. But one needs to look carefully, details matter!Ryan C (08:06:50) :
Just come back from lunch break at work, and they have posters all over the walls here about the WWF Climate Change Earth Hour, made me instantly angry. Shall I risk my job and tear all these things down?
Channel that anger into something useful. I’m currently working on a Skeptics Climate Science wiki project. Care to help?

Mike Strong (10:05:34) :
Can you educate me a bit without my having to go the entire site to find out how they did their calculations.

I would suggest you do go to the site and read about it, also find out about Jason, Topex etc. It is much better to do this yourself rather than being fed bite size portions if you catch my drift. To givean idea of sensitivity there was a period of a few months when the data was incorrect due to the early use of the ‘leap second’. The graph shows the annual variations well, you can remove this noise and add an inverse barometer to allow for pressure differences.
The graph also reveals the effects on global sea level of El Nino and La Nina, unfortunately some people either don’t realise this or ignore this to further their agenda, a good example is the post from Smokey

Smokey (09:21:12) :
That chart shows that there has been no rise in the sea level from 2006 – 2009. There has been no rise in global warming either. In fact, temps have fallen.
Who are you and Al trying to fool?

It’s a shame some people are like this but luckily there are plenty who correct them…..continually!

I will at least be able to face my children when they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say, “I tried”.
And if I am wrong I will be again able to say to my children that the world is a cleaner place because of the actions we unecessarily took.
This is much better than burying my head in the sand and hoping it will all go away.

Well, some of us feel QUITE THE OPPOSITE. We’d like to face our children and grandchildren as they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say “I tried to stop them, really I did”.
I’d like to be able to say “here’s a car”, instead of “here are a week’s worth of transportation vouchers”. I’d like to say, “here, let me help you with the downpayment on a house” instead of “here, let me help out with 3 months rent on a government sanctioned rental unit, too bad nobody can afford personal homes anymore”.
I’d like to say “when I’m gone, this will all be yours”… instead of “when I’m gone, the government will take this all away to balance my carbon imbalance”.
Save us your self-righteous and erroneous precautionary principle. EVERY SKEPTIC HERE has already looked at the evidence AS PRESENTED by alarmists, and come to the conclusion that alarm and action are not only unwarranted, but the actions proposed are MORE HARMFUL than the alleged problem.

“thefordprefect”: Couple things- 1. you just talk endlessly about GW. GW =/= AGW. 2. CET shows warming ~throughout~ its record, not just recently. It starts in the middle of the LIA. WTF do you expect? 3. So it appears that this is more about how you ~feel~ than facts. How irrational:
“I will at least be able to face my children when they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say, “I tried”.
And if I am wrong I will be again able to say to my children that the world is a cleaner place because of the actions we unecessarily took.”
Well, that’s nice and all. Maybe you can explain to them why you needlessly squandered the wealth of the world they should have inherited to address a problem that wasn’t possible to address or necessary. Moreover, you once again stupidly, like all feel good environmentalist liberals, equate the issue of AGW with pollution control. In point of fact, real pollution is and has been a rapidly diminishing problem in the Western World since way before AGW. But now many of your alarmist friends propose re-polluting the air to offset warming. The planet in the future will be cleaner if we don’t do anything about AGW. If we do, it will be poorer, dirtier, no climatically different than it would have been otherwise, and less free (not that you care about that).
Do I disagree with the initial warming 1.3 C figure? Meh. It doesn’t sound quite right, more like 1 C, but that’s splitting hairs. But as for your methane and watervapor feedbacks, perhaps you can explain a) why methane has stopped increasing and b) Why you totally ignore cloud processes, which could significantly offset the warming tendency? Because if we think to much, it will be “too late”? Guess what? If AGW really is a crisis, their is close to nothing you can do about it, and nothing at all that wouldn’t involve massive reduction in energy use and quality of life decline to go along with it. I will feel proud when I look at my children (not that I think I’ll have any, but I’ll keep my options open) that I fought to keep them free and living in a world were their quality of life is at least as good as mine was if not better because I stopped self righteous zealots like yourself from reversing the industrial revolution. Good day sir.

BTW “Good day sir.” is my way of saying that I don’t have the energy deal with your dense head anymore. So, even if you choose to throw spittle my way again, I won’t given you the giggles from your obvious intellectual masochism. I have other small minds to thrash.

Anthony, Charles, everyone…
Where can I get a list of 19th century surface stations with their exact positions along with their recorded data? Or even all/most global stations over the last century and a half?
I want to do an intense study of the effects of urbanisation and land use changes over time. I will also need to study historical maps to get a good idea of how much smog from homes, businesses and factories was blocking out sunlight during the early days of temperature monitoring.Reply: This may be helpful to you, that’s a big task. ~ charles the moderator

Pierre Gosselin (03:10:06) :
Anything about the ICCC? NO!
1) The PR persons for the ICCC ought to be fired.
2) Screw FOXNEWS.

Actually Fox has had coverage on the conference. Glenn Beck had a 5 minute interview with Dr. Bob Carter, an Australian who was participating in the ICCC. He pointed out that the MSM ignored the conference and was supportive of the comments that the “science was not settled”
It was on Tuesdays show 3/12/09 about 35 minutes into the show.
Larry

I’d love to help out Lucy, but I am have a mathematics background and currently work in municipal govt, I know nothing about climate besides what I read online and witness in life. I am mainly skeptical because I find it very obvious that AGW is such a political thing, just by reading the MSM and listening to the non stop contradictions and hypocrites. I know a lot based on readings, but if an AGW alarmist did a background check and noticed that I was a mathy and not a “climate scientist”, they would discredit your whole site.

Thanks Charles
DAV, I mean a virtual simulation of driving a car. There are many and they keep getting better. Some are geared towards realism and some towards gaming physics. But nothing, after four decades of development and massive increases in computing power, has been able to approximately simulate driving a car.
Programmers are doing better with airplanes but even in that area, even in military grade software and hardware, they are far short of approximating reality.
It’s mostly the environment’s effect on a vehicle that programmers find most difficult.
So imagine trying to simulate the whole world’s climate. All the models currently in operation are very crude and lacking.

Aron
I did a study to try to see how much co2 was being put into the atmosphere during the 19th Century as I wanted to check Ernst Becks assertions.
Take into account dirty coal with few emissions controls being burnt in hearths, factories, boilers, agricultural machines, steam trains, the manufacture and use of gas, and the tens of thousands of steam ships emitting co2/smoke along sea lanes and into ports and I think co2 was probably similar to today’s.
All this caused smog so you might also usefully look at the dates of various clean air acts. In Britain our clean act was in the 1950’s I believe and I think checking out these will give a good idea of which countries were most polluted and therefore most likely to have temperatures corrupted by lack of sunlight.
I think I have posted this CET graph for you before but you will note that as well as temperatures it contains the offical IPCC figures for emissions of coal gas, etc.http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/menken_hobgoblin.jpg
This is also available as a spread sheet form if you needed it.
By the way there were around 100 surface stations in 1850 (50 reliable) and GS Callendar believed there were only 200 reliable ones in 1938 according to his archives. He was very interested in this subject and kept copious notes so there might be something in there for you. I have a particular interest in global temperatures to 1850 so if you want to post in a few days and tell me what information you have obtained I can see if I have anything different.
Are you in the UK?
Good luck
TonyB

Pragmatic (09:40:22) : What Duke fails to mention is the fact that Pope Urban himself had given Galileo permission to publish his book “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” He was urged to portray heliocentricity as a theory. … While Mr. Duke’s defense of the Church is admirable – it was the Church that forced a good scientist to sign an onerous recantation. And it was the Church that locked him in prison even after doing so.
The parts you left out, Prag: 1) Galileo was asked, possibly in some quaint Italian way, to keep it as theory — meaning no advocacy — unless he could provide sufficient proof; 2) he not only failed to do this but one “participant” in the Dialogue was a common fool, Simplicio, espousing the non-heliocentric side who clearly was meant to be the voice of Urban himself; 3) the “prison” was house arrest — rather mild considering his open insult of a potential, powerful ally.
Galileo had the salesmanship of one JH wouldn’t you say?

Household bills to soar because of climate change, claim scientists,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/4968378/Household-bills-to-soar-because-of-climate-change-claim-scientists.html
The average cost of living is likely to increase dramatically to pay for the impact of global warming, (it certainly will with cap and trade).
Heat related deaths will increase, (no mention of a decrease in cold related deaths).
Even garden maintenance will increase as longer summers and wetter, warmer winters will mean that lawns need mowing more often.
The findings are to be presented to a climate summit in Copenhagen by Alastair Hunt, a researcher at Bath University who studied the potential affect of global warming on health services, local councils, households and gardens.
What total drivel.

The birth of a sceptic.
I took an interest in climate change about five years ago, but at the time had no real idea what the arguments were and who believed what. I had heard of things like the Kyoto agreement and thought that, as President Bush was against it, it was probably a good thing to support. The media continued to drip feed terms like “carbon footprint”, “eco friendly” and “renewable resources which became so much part of everyday language, that it became difficult to imagine a conversation without at least one cropping up somewhere.
It wasn’t until Al Gore came on the scene that the details behind the concept began to appear. There seemed to be no doubt that what he was saying was true. There were no dissenting voices on the TV or in the newspapers, people openly talked about the mess we had made and how we had to act now in order to save the planet.
At this point I realised that I had begun to believe in and have opinions on something that I actually knew nothing about.
The Internet came to the rescue, dozens of blog sites and at first I was amazed to find that there were people out there that did not believe in this thing called AGW. The main difference between the sites seemed to be that one side of the argument knew that they were right and didn’t feel the need to present any evidence; the other side did present data and were excommunicated from the human race for doing so.
At 51 I have just managed to finish my degree and during the last two years have been studying environmental science. These years of enquiring finally led me to fall on the side of the sceptics.
My main reasons are:
Man has never been able to predict weather or climate with any degree of accuracy, how is it that we can now be so sure of events up to 100 years in the future?
Many great scientists throughout history have carried out experiments which required accurate measurement of atmospheric CO2. Some of these readings have been higher than those of today. Do we have a valid reason to discredit their work?
Am I really expected to believe that there exists or has existed any technology that can measure the average global temperature with sufficient accuracy to assert that there has been a rise in temperature of such a small amount?
While at school in the 70’s I was told that if the icecaps grew much bigger, there was a risk that the earth’s centre of gravity would move nearer to the poles causing a faster spin.
I do not believe that it is possible to model climate without taking the sun into account.
For now – that is enough for me to doubt, I do not work in science and so have no financial motivation to doubt.
Please keep the faith.
Richard Hobley – Oxford England

This shows nicely the reduction in global sea level from the strong La Nina last year and the cooler La Nina conditions this year. When Enso conditions are neutral (as they were throughout mid 2008) this shows the ‘correct’ mean level, i.e the level when not affected by ENSO conditions or events. Mid 2008 was at the same level as the very strong El Nino which you guys always cherry pick (see click 2 for an example)

click2

Typical cherrypicking, not only do you pick the time during the El Nino but the graph ends at the beginning of 2008, why is this period picked, wouldn’t be something to do with the strong La Nina would it? Cherry picking to mislead at its worst.

>I have the image in my mind of DJ typing in his post, then putting his hands over his eyes, so as not to read any response to his post. He is firmly entrenched in his beliefs. There are none so blind, ……
David I don’t reply because all I see are talking points. Climate change is a science debate – or it would be if sceptics published. The continuing conflation of the science debate with the mitigation “debate” underscores that it is not the science that matters among most who post here. Its an ideological adversion to the policies that might be necessary if the science is taken seriously by policy makers. That is seen by the fact that most sceptics are also sceptical of CO2 as an agent for acidification (a completely independent area of science).
I also know when non-experts (like yourself) adopt a position where you are willing to argue against a massive literature produced by climate scientists that you are driven by belief and ideology and not science.
BTW I understand the US has had the driest start to a year on record. Let’s hope you don’t suffer horrible summer heatwaves like NZ & OZ lest your poll numbers go the other way.

Mike Strong
We have had this discussion with Mary before.
Firstly the satellites are NOT accurate to mm but only centimetres (if at all) . The following two sites give a good description of the process-which is being constantly refined but doesn’t get more accurate as the inherent flaws in measuring capabilities can’t be resolved.http://www.tos.org/oceanography/issues/issue_archive/issue_pdfs/15_1/15_1_jacobs_et_al.pdfhttp://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/Journal/Issues/1999/dec/abs1635.html
The following site deals with problems of the data;http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=859
This with reliabilityhttp://lightblueline.org/satellite-tracking-sea-levels-set-launch
This link gives a graphic map showing coastline length.http://www.mapsofworld.com/world-top-ten/world-top-ten-longest-coastline-countries-map.html
This gives it textually by individual countryhttp://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/List-of-countries-by-length-of-coastline
The worlds coastline is some 1 million plus KM in total and virtually each kilometre will be affected by different factors, some real some imagined.
These include melting ice sheets/gravity (the case put forward at the Copenhagen conference) stasis, erosion, tectonics, deposition, building projects, changes of currents, barometric pressure, state of the tide, thermal expansion, reliabilty of the monitoring equipment and how that is turned into data are just a few.
It is very difficult to determine where the ‘top’ of the sea is anyway, or its mean height. It’s a bit like trying to hit a constantly moving target and made more difficult when it’s done from space using satellites that have difficulty in reading what is the surface and what is under it. Consequently they have considerable margins of error that is greater than the measurement they are taking.
Secondly , just like temperatures, sea levels go up and down and the older datasets clearly show this
Newlyn in Cornwallhttp://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/resids/170-161.gif
and
Helsinki.http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/resids/060-351.gif
The following link leads to a graph produced by the Dutch Govt sea level organisation- and confirm sea levels are stable and are somewhat lower than during the MWP.http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=61
The greatest sea level expert in the world is Prof Morner.
Morner says: “The mean eustatic rise in sea level for the period 1850-1930 was in the order of 1.0-1.1
mm/year,” but that “after 1930-40, this rise seems to have stopped (Pirazzoli et al., 1989; Morner, 1973,2000).” This stasis, in his words, “lasted, at least, up to the mid-60s.” Thereafter, “the record can be divided into three parts: (1) 1993-1996 with a clear trend of stability, (2) 1997-1998 with a high-amplitude rise and fall recording the ENSO event of these years and (3) 1998-2000 with an irregular record of no clear tendency.” Most important of all, in his words, “There is a total absence of any recent ‘acceleration in sea level rise’ as often claimed by IPCC and related groups.”
He concludes: “When we consider past records, recorded variability, causational processes involved and the last century’s data, our best estimate of possible future sea-level changes is +10 +/- 10cm in a century, or, maybe, even +5 +/- 15cm.” See also Morner (1995); INQUA (2000).”
I am inclined to agree with Professor Morner that sea level is not really doing very much generally (with exceptions either way in some places)http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldeconaf/12/12we18.htm
The above link dissects the data and states that a rise by 2100 of 5cm is possible…. plus or minus 15cm!
Morner stresses (as I do) that observational data contradicts the theoretical interpolated and massaged data that is used by the IPCC.
John Daly also had a good handle on all this.http://www.john-daly.com/deadisle/index.htm
The sea level is not rising at the rate suggested-it has dropped in recent years according to many local gauges (what is global sea level supposed to mean with a million kilometres of coastline-it is meaningless)
To reach a 1 metre increase by 2100 means an average of nearly 11mm a year (only 91 years remaining). There is simply no evidence to show this is happening.
Tonyb

Lucy S. – A contributing factor to the increased rate of CO2 generation may have to do with the development of China. In the four years ending 2007, China’s coal consumption increased by as much as the US’s total coal consumption.
It is little remarked in the climate world, but, in fact, the action in carbon emmissions is in China, and increasingly, India. US, European, and Japanese fossil fuel consumption is falling, by and large.

“Elizabeth (08:32:05) :
This is fascinating, considering the extent to which mainstream media and education systems treat AGW as a settled science. In fact, most consider reporting on the skeptic side to be socially irresponsible.
Hopefully our policy makers are getting the message.”
Sorry…but I believe you have a niave view of our “policy makers”. If by policy makers you are referring to our politicians, they have but one goal and one goal only, that being to get as much money from both citizens and industry as possible. It can be called a tax or a fee, matters not, but they need money, lots and lots of money. Without money, there is no power, and without power there is no influence, and without either of those things, people question why they are needed at all.
So no…never try to enlighten a politician. They basically could care less. They care about transferring money…and AGW provides a mechanism the likes of which most of them have never witnessed. We should start a pool for when the first local lawn mower fees get enacted at the rural town level, cuz they’re coming.
Jim

Back at ya Mary Hinge about the sea level rise measurements. So it is a radar altimeter…I was right about the not-better-than centimeter accuracy (per measurement)…but I understand about the “few-hundred thousand” repeats of the same measurements over 10 days can give them reasonable faith that their data is correct to the “several millimeters” level. The NASA site:
“TOPEX/Poseidon range measurements are accurate to 3-4 centimeters. The range measurements are subtracted from POD-derived estimates of the satellite orbital height, resulting in ocean height measurements that are good to 4-5 centimeters (better than 2 inches) relative to the center of the Earth.
This accuracy figure pertains to a few-kilometer spot on the ocean surface directly beneath the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite. By averaging the few-hundred thousand measurements collected by the satellite in the time it takes to cover the global oceans (10 days), global mean sea level can be determined with a precision of several millimeters. ”
I got this from: http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/technology.html
Well, there ya go. But despite the 2″ ocean level rise in 16 years, the question is it from AGW, or something else like plate tectonics or ????

Aron (12:01:22) : DAV, I mean a virtual simulation of driving a car. There are many and they keep getting better. Some are geared towards realism and some towards gaming physics. But nothing, after four decades of development and massive increases in computing power, has been able to approximately simulate driving a car.
Do you mean making it indistinguishable from physically driving one? Not sure what the point would be. That would require lots of feedback (tactile, aural, olfactory, kinetic, etc.) which moves the simulation from model to mechanism. This has been done very well for aircraft because of economic sense. And those are realistic enough to substitute for actual flight experience. I’ve even seen someone get sick in one.
But all of that is a completely different endeavour than weather/climate simulation. No, the latter models aren’t all that good yet but there’s no real impediment for improvement. You are right but for some very wrong reasons. It is unnecessary that a computer model of wx/climate should ever become an actual mechanism. The model output doesn’t have to supply a realistic experience to be useful.

Climate change is a science debate – or it would be if sceptics published.

You probably think that skeptical scientists don’t publish, because others have told you that. And you believe them. But since the AGW/CO2 hypothesis is predicated on false information, it’s wise to be skeptical of anything its proponents claim.
In this case, they’re deliberately lying to you. For example, here’s the work of just one skeptical scientist, out of literally thousands: click

Thanks a lot, Tony.
Yes, I’m a Londoner. When I look out my bedroom window near Baker Street I see thousands upon thousands of now decommissioned chimneys. In the 19th century London had more chimneys than people. The smog was so dense people were forced to wear hats, gloves, beards and long sleeves even during the summer to protect their skin and nails. It wasn’t just a Victorian fashion statement, it was practical for their health, and no doubt the dimming effect of the smog meant that even when fully dressed during the summer it wasn’t as hot as it could have been without the smog.
I think 1850 would be a very good starting point because it is a period I know very well from my non-scientific studies. Is it possible to get a list of those 100 surface stations and where they were located?
Thank you very much for the information and I look forward to working on this together if you want.

(Long time lurker, first time poster so full disclosure, I guess. 28, female, Canadian, B.Sc. Geology, B.Sc. Zoology and I work for this company.)
@ thefordprefect
Just because I oppose capital punishment doesn’t mean I oppose crime. Likewise, just because the science behind AGW is shoddy, doesn’t mean the “moral of the story” is worthless. You can certainly be an AGW-doubter and still be an advocate for using our resources as fairly and efficiently as possible and therefore providing the service to our descendants that you are calling for.
In this case, the (fear-mongering) means don’t justify the (frugal use of resources) ends.
And you owe an apology to Douglas Adams.

We will be handing off a different planet to our children and grandchildren regardless, or irregardless for those in Rio Linda. I thought King Canute did a great job explaining it to the Brits centuries ago. It won’t matter if seas rise or fall, someone will lose out and complain. My ocean front mansion sank, or my ocean front mansion can’t see the ocean anymore.

“I will at least be able to face my children when they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say, “I tried”.
And if I am wrong I will be again able to say to my children that the world is a cleaner place because of the actions we unecessarily took.
This is much better than burying my head in the sand and hoping it will all go away.
Mike”
Great. Glad you have those responses all worked out.
Now what will you say to the millions…yes, millions that will perish from starvation due to the policies you are promoting?
“I tried” sounds rather pithy in that light.
JimB

Mary Hinge,
This article below is a lengthy piece in the Guardian the greenest of green UK papers, it is full of catastrophic projected sea level rise and like similar press articles aimed at the general public is just rhetoric with not one single reference to any actual observed rise. Give a link to any paper that shows any observed sea level rise in the Maldives over the past 30 years. I presume that if sea levels were in fact rising the Maldives would be the ideal place to observe this.http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/mar/08/climate-change-flooding

Hadley admits that they have been adjusting HadCET since 1974 to account for the urban heat island effect:
“Since 1974 the data have been adjusted to allow for urban warming.”
But what is their method for subtracting urban warming from the data? Is it using an average or a precisely measured anomaly for each site?
At least they admit that they have not accounted for urban effects prior to 1974, which means 200 years of prior temperature data needs to be reconstructed.

Rob and Mary,
Here’s video evidence that sea levels are not rising around the Maldives.
Whenever I give that link to an alarmist who mentions the Maldives they can only respond with personal attacks, which is fine by me because it reveals the content of their character.

Mary Hinge (12:31:25) …
Yes there’s a cooling trend in recent years. Commenting on that is “cherry-picking”?
But more to the point… since the trend of rising ocean levels has stayed slow but steady since the 1870s, and CO2 level have supposedly only dramatically risen since the late 1950s… why haven’t the seas accellerated their rise? It’s as if CO2 doesn’t matter at all? Where’s the long-predicted spike?
Is a 140 year trend “cherry picking”? Is it weather rather than climate? none of the usual counter-arguments seem to apply.

DJ – By all means, it should be a debate amongst scientists, as isolated from politics and culture as quantum mechanics. We did not choose to drag it out into a realm where it infringes our rights and encroaches on our lives, and since we do not live under meritocracy nor have any desire to do so, the reaction you described is every bit as justified as it was inevitable. When the Marxists and Malthusians stop using science as a weapon to force their ideologies upon everyone else, most of us non-experts will gladly return to enjoying our existence instead of criticizing The Science.

Lord Stern is going nutshttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7940532.stm
The Danish Prime Minister agrees and is saying we should set a 2C rise as a goal instead of the 5C projections of the models.
I seriously doubt that we’d get a 1C rise anyway because the 19th and 20th century’s CO2 emissions were the peak of human CO2 output. We’ve been decarbonising our energy sources for over a century and it won’t be long before we have very low carbon solutions.
Politicians are simply using our natural creative destruction of out-going technology as an opportunity to tax by making it appear that without their insistence and dramatic predictions we will always be using old technology.

DJ (12:38:33) :
BTW I understand the US has had the driest start to a year on record. Let’s hope you don’t suffer horrible summer heatwaves like NZ & OZ lest your poll numbers go the other way.
When did NZ have a horrible heatwave? Maybe I missed it while I was in Hong Kong for Christmas. it seemed a little more humid than usual in February but was not truly remarkable.
Annette in Auckland where March seems to be presaging an early winter.

Aron
i thought you must be British, I am from South Devon. I am fairly tied up over the next week or two writing an article, so my postings here will be limited.
However if you want to send me your email address I can send the links to the information I have. I suspect the nitty gritty of names of weather stations will be in the Callendar archives as in most published work they tend to be alluded to as the overall number, rather than as specific stations.
The archives are on a dvd and some are difficult to read as they are in Callendars handwriting. I got it for the co2 information that he compiled as I am in fairly regular contact with Ernst Beck re his belief in past high co2 levels. I suspect he may have access to some useful related information also.
These threads move fast so make sure I acknowledge any reply you give.
BTW your description of the smog reinforces the suspicion of the presence of considerable amounts of co2 -amongst other chemicals- from the burning of vast amounts of coal in all walks of life. Whilst the actual amount was said to be limited according to the IPCC charts I posted, I wonder if this reflects the reality of the potency of burning poor quality coal with few emission filters.
Tonyb

DJ whines: I don’t reply because all I see are talking points
Perhaps DJ needs to remove his AGW blinders from his face. Unless they are permanently welded on, that is.
And:I also know when non-experts … adopt a position where you are willing to argue against a massive literature produced by climate scientists that you are driven by belief and ideology and not science.
Ah, yes, the old appeal to authority – “massive literature”. That never gets old. How about quality, eh? That pile of horse manure is indeed “massive”, but it sure reeks to high heaven!
It is, of course, the AGWers who are driven by “belief and ideology”, relying, as they must, on pseudo-scientific drivel, and a grab-bag of tricks they use to try to stifle debate, such as ad hominems, strawmen, appeals to authority, and red herrings.

…you average the temps…if they’re increasing….well…there’s really no argument is there?

I’m not sure I follow, but there is, in fact, an occasional alarmist argument that temperatures are rising.
But of course, they’re wrong:click1click2click3
Plenty more where those came from. But you get the picture.

DAV (12:25:06) :
“The parts you left out, Prag: 1) Galileo was asked, possibly in some quaint Italian way, to keep it as theory — meaning no advocacy — unless he could provide sufficient proof; 2) he not only failed to do this but one “participant” in the Dialogue was a common fool, Simplicio, espousing the non-heliocentric side who clearly was meant to be the voice of Urban himself; 3) the “prison” was house arrest — rather mild considering his open insult of a potential, powerful ally.”
Cardinal Bellarmine demanded that Galileo not “hold or defend” Copernicus – a specious command in violation of even the most ignorant understanding of scientific method.
The character of Simplicio, while subject to ridicule was far from a common fool. He espoused the Aristotelian, geocentric cosmology, the consensus of the day. That consensus included Pope Urban’s favorite anti-heliocentric argument: God could have made the universe any way he wanted to and still made it appear to us the way it does. Hardly “an open insult” and certainly not damaging to a Pope Galileo had dedicated his previous book to. In modern parlance we’d suggest the good Pope… suck it up.
“House arrest” is the fascist’s excuse for playing Big Brother; depriving those incarcerated freedom of movement and income. It is amusing to read defenders of the Inquisition – an institution that buried or distorted the truth and held up scientific progress for the better part of a century.

No those are the proportion of each group that feel AGW is exaggerated.
By the way Bret Baier Report on Fox tonight (3/12/09) had another item regarding the ICCC conference, they had a 30 second bit about 30 min into the program which quoted Richard Lindzen.
There are starting to be small notations in some of the more conservative major press but the classic liberal MSM outlets still are mostly ignoring the debate.
Larry

Americans under 30 are pampered, dissolute Marxists (sometimes anarchists) who underperform pitifully in math, hard sciences, and engineering after 60 years of softened, socialist curricula. May they burn in hell.

What policies am I promoting?
Conserving fuel (more efficient vehicles, house insulation, more efficient energy use)
renewable energy (solar, wind, pv, wave)
phase out coal (do not phase in nuclear!)
I assume your reference is for bio fuel. I certainly would not promote this as the figures prove that it can never replace fossil fuel. I think you will find most “greenies” would now agree with this.
Mike

What does a Gallup poll have to do with the amount of CO2 that is actually in the air?

The Gallup poll and CO2 have as much in common as global temperatures and CO2 [ie, not very much at all].
And thefordprefect:

“phase out coal (do not phase in nuclear!)”

That right there will cause much pain, suffering and death among the world’s poor.
Coal is about the cheapest heating energy available, and as any educated person knows, cold kills. But I guess that’s a small price to pay for political correctness — at least for people lacking a conscience. And as long as it’s someone else doing the dying.
And of course, let’s never phase in nuclear energy. Why not? Well, you don’t really say why not. Guess we’ll just have to take your word for it, eh?

Pragmatic (16:24:31) : Cardinal Bellarmine demanded that Galileo not “hold or defend” Copernicus – a specious command in violation of even the most ignorant understanding of scientific method.
Words effectively meaning “do not advocate.”
The scientific method was just emerging from chrysalis in Galileo’s time. It was novel and hardly widely accepted. You seem to think they should have known better.
Galileo surely was aware of the political climate which makes his gaffe inexplicable. Of course, he could have been one of the very first geeks. IMHO, Urban was doing his best to get Galileo’s view spread.
Not the best place but start here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo
This is hardly important and OT. No need to keep going round about it.

I assume your reference is for bio fuel. I certainly would not promote this as the figures prove that it can never replace fossil fuel. I think you will find most “greenies” would now agree with this.

Of course, but they didn’t agree with it before, and look at how many people have already suffered and died as a result. How many millions of lives does one get a free pass on while they figure things out? The green beasts can’t bring people back to life once the miscalculation is realized, nor restore all the years of life people spent suffering.

You’re a winner! …well, you would be a winner, if there was a contest for the world’s lamest and most self-centered response.
The poor of this world, unlike you, depend on cheap heating to live — which most often means coal heat. You would deny the lowest income people of the world the only practical means to avoid death from exposure to cold — simply to gratify your green proclivities.
So, why don’t we have a poll of poor folks? We could ask them if some of them wouldn’t mind dying for your globaloney cause. What do you say to that? Let’s ask the people directly affected, whether we should jack up their heating bills just to make you happy.
Deal? Or do you think that instead, we should ram higher heating costs down the throats of poor folks in order to satisfy your self-centered greenness? Because that’s what you’re telling them: “die for the green cause, because it makes me feel good.”

Parse Error (19:51:20) :
…look at how many people have already suffered and died as a result. How many millions of lives does one get a free pass on while they figure things out? …
I am sorry to say that I do not know how many deaths have been caused by fuel crop growing – please point out a mainstream article where these deaths are enumerated.
How many will suffer and die as a result of AGW if it is true? How many areas of the world will become uninhabitable. Will you welcome these refugees to become neighbours? How much area will become unfarmable? What happens to low lying areas (a metre of sea level rise does not just cover land falling below this level additional weathering will erode coasts more than the initial inundation)

Smokey (20:30:12) :
… the world’s lamest and most self-centered response.
The poor of this world, unlike you, depend on cheap heating to live …
I think you misunderstood my simplistic comment.
It’s us in the UK/US/GER/etc powering coal fired power stations that are emitting the CO2. The odd kilo tonne of coal burnt in (somewhere cold and poor) will have little effect on CO2 output.
Some examples:
“Coal Creek Station uses about 22,000 tons of lignite per day, or about 7.5 to 8.0 million tons per year, to generate electricity for Great River Energy’s customers.” to produce 1.1GW
and
“A 600 MWe coal-fired power station operating at 38% efficiency and 75% overall availability will consume approximately:
– Bituminous coal (CV 6000 kcal/kg NAR*): 1.5 Mt/annum
– Brown coal (CV 2250 kcal/kg NAR*): 4.0 Mt/annum”

To support Smokey,
RE: Coal to stay alive
I’ve been to Northern China, Inner Mongolia and the PR of Mongolia 12 times. In northern China, there are about 200,000 people who live in uninsulated brick houses heated primarily with corn stalks or coal. See this village scene on a frosty morn…http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/2/d/8/63987/cornsmoke4-0.jpg
I took this picture on a frosty morning in May 2006 in the very upper tip of Heilongjiang Province. (BTW … some 700,000,000 peasant farmers live in small single family brick homes in China.)
The heat in these homes comes from a cooking firebox. The flue runs horizontally through a sitting room/bedroom. The bed sits atop the flue for heat. Then the flue turns upward to a chimney.
This part of the world gets bitterly cold…it is often between -15° and -35° (and colder) for weeks on end. They burn coal or corn straw … or die.
It’s a hard life. Many westerners, especially eco weenies, just don’t get it.
Clive

thefordprefect said “The odd kilo tonne of coal burnt in (somewhere cold and poor) will have little effect on CO2 output.”
See my above post. You don’t get it. The “odd kilotonne” is patently laughable.
thefordprefect, you apparently have no idea what goes on to keep these people alive and warm. The millions of tons of fuels burnt in many regions of the world simply go unaccounted. (Personal observation.) You and I turn on the light switch and that power is accounted for and developed countries have strict monitoring of fuel use. I’ve seen trucks dump tonnes of coal in a village common area and villagers load up wheelbarrows full. This ain’t on some spreadsheet somewhere. We’ve no idea.
To paraphrase: a million wheelbarrows here, a million wheelbarrows there .. and pretty soon we’re talking a lot of coal.
Cheers!
Clive

thefordprefect,
Asking your “what if” questions is simply a rhetorical tactic. But since anyone can play, I’m in.
You ask:
“How many will suffer and die as a result of AGW if it is true?”
Answer: Zero. Prove me wrong. I’m waiting.
“How many areas of the world will become uninhabitable?”
Answer: Exactly as many currently uninhabitable areas that will become habitable in a slightly warmer world.
“Will you welcome these refugees to become neighbours?”
Will you? Better yet, will you invite them into your home? Or will you treat them the same way you treat all the poor unwashed, who you want to deny inexpensive heating in the name of eliminating beneficial CO2?
“How much area will become unfarmable?”
The exact same area that will become farmable due to beneficial warming. In fact, with warmer weather the extent of usable land will increase, which will take a burden off the backs of the poor. Not that you would care about that.
It’s clear that you just don’t get it, thefordprefect: a somewhat warmer, more balmy and pleasant climate is more desirable than what we have now; while colder temperatures will certainly kill people.
But they’re only poor people, and therefore expendable for your environmentalist cause, right? It is a universal trait of greenies that they are unconcerned with what is euphemistically called “collateral damage.”
It’s all for the socialistic/green cause, isn’t that the message? A few million people killed here and there is a small price to pay for your dictatorial green UN world government, eh?
As long as those people being killed by green policies aren’t you or your pals, of course.

thefordprefect said “How much area will become unfarmable?”
I’ve spent 40 years in agricultural production on the Canadian prairies and (as noted) worked on agricultural projects in northern China and Mongolia. When I was in university over 40 years ago we were being warned then that the (then) trend to cooling would end corp production in Northern Alberta. Thankfully it warmed again.
A drop of one or two degrees would devastate vast areas of food production on Canada, Northern Europe and Russia. An increase will do (has done) wonders for production. I can’t speak with authority on warmer climes, but would hazard a guess that a shift of one or two degrees in a warm climate will have less of an impact than a shift of one or two degrees in a colder climate. Just a hunch.
But this is all moot because we can’t do a thing about climate. Period.
Cheers!
Clive

thefordprefect keeps digging himself a bigger hole the more he replies, it’s quite funny to watch. Won’t be long until thefordprefect is towed off to a scrapyard for recycling. I wonder what he will return as? Maybe thewestinghouserefrigerator.

I am sorry to say that I do not know how many deaths have been caused by fuel crop growing – please point out a mainstream article where these deaths are enumerated.

Do you honestly believe that food prices can increase dramatically without pricing some people out of the market so to speak, or does that only matter if this effect can be easily and immediately quantified? If it’s the latter, then how can you possibly claim to care so much about imaginary suffering and death in a hypothetical future?

How many will suffer and die as a result of AGW if it is true?

With good planning and likely technological advancements, probably not a single one. On the other hand, how many might suffer and die if do not waste all our resources on building defenses against alien invasions, since nobody can be certain whether they will ever happen or not?
Hypothetically, what if the Earth does start to descend into another glacial period, and people decided that the best way to preserve the environment as we know it for the sake our children, grandchildren, and beyond, would be to live as lavishly as possible and pump out all the CO2 our coal-fired power plants and Hummers can manage, would you support that solution?

Weare not in a La Nina yet by any defintion. I have constantly used BOM as an indicator and will always do so as it seems a more reliable indicator of ENSO, however on this blog I refer to NOAA as this seems to be the source of choice for many posters (when NOAA start to announce an El Nino prematurely I’m sure that allegiance will change!) As discussed in previous posts we have in the last two months been in La Nina conditions as defined by NOAA and neutral conditions as defined by BOM. Despite the recent cooling in parts of the equatorial East Pacific this is unlikely to allow conditions to persist to qualify as a La Nina. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/indices.shtml
My prediction in September was there would be no La Nina this SH summer and this has proven correct, even by NOAA definition we are not likely to see a La Nina event. There is a slight possibility that this late cooling discussed may cause an unusual SH autumn La Nina but I still expect conditions to remain neutral, SOI is now at its lowest since September of last year http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/soi30.png

“It’s us in the UK/US/GER/etc powering coal fired power stations that are emitting the CO2. The odd kilo tonne of coal burnt in (somewhere cold and poor) will have little effect on CO2 output.”
Heat is only one part of the equation. What about power?…how much time is spent in poor populations that lack basic electricity to continually gather food that can’t be stored for any length of time? Go spend a month somewhere with no electricity, and see how much of your time/calories are devoted just to keeping yourself fed.
Conservation is great. Higher mileage vehicles are great. Btw?…in Europe you can purchase very fuel efficient vehicles that run on small diesel engines that deliver 50-60mpg. The reason that same vehicle isn’t available here?…the environmental movement has blocked their sale and usage.
JimB

http://www.petersoninstitute.org/publications/papers/rosen0507.pdf
China Energy A Guide for the Perplexed
Of the 50 percent of coal not consumed by the
power sector, the majority is sold directly to industry for
use in boilers, coking ovens and on-site (“inside the
fence”) power generation. Household coal consumption,
which accounted for 20 percent of total demand in 1985,
has dropped to 4 percent as China’s residents move into
homes equipped with gas and electricity for cooking and
heating.http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_coa_con-energy-coal-consumption
1.31G short tons = 1.18Gtonnes
4%=47Mtonnes used domestically
This is equivalent to 7GW of electricity generation using coalhttp://stats.berr.gov.uk/energystats/dukes5_4.xls
Uk used 53Mtonnes in generation
So to some extent I agree that China domestic coal use is significant in CO2.
Is China planning to put a carbon Tax on coal for domestic use?
The UK is perpetually on the brink of a drought (or inundation!) A couple of degrees +ve shift may allow me to grow mediterranean crops but it could destroy grain harvests (an a green and pleasant land).
Mike

Haven’t reviewed all comments of this thread, therefore this may be redundant.
Interesting blog from the UN in preparation for the Kyoto successor conference – Copenhagen, December 2009:http://en.cop15.dk/blogs/climate+thinkers+blog
check this arrogant and silly statement (and there is much more…):
“The debate about the reality of climate change is over. Climate change is a fact, and it poses the greatest single global threat faced by humankind in our generation.
L. Craig Johnstone, Deputy High Commissioner, UNHCR”
of course, climate change is a fact – it always changes and humankind has always adapted as best as it could. Why don’t they display some honesty and declare up-front that they mean only AWG?
Ramping up to Kyoto2 may deserve a coordinated task-force approach from the realist side?
Ulrich Lobsiger

thefordprefect wrote:“It’s not the poor that’re pouring out the CO2.”
I’ve read that cooking fires in Africa (and possibly elsewhere) are significant CO2 contributors.
The impact on the poor from the shift of US cropland to biofuel production is in the headlines now. The advocates of the legislative subsidies for these biofuels yesterday were just as heedless of the side-effect of their actions as are the opponents of coal today. (Somewhere on this site there is probably exact documentation of these costs, but this site isn’t topically organized with forum-type software (like Invision’s), so it’s hard to find.)
The problems of nuclear waste might be made manageable by some combination of pebble-bed reactors, mini-reactors (waterless), fast breeder reactors, and waste-dumping in steel canisters into deep mud northwest of Hawaii, where it could be safely sequestered. (Except that Clinton banned it.)

thefordprefect (09:44:41) :
I do not think there will be anybody on this board to deny that we have been warming since the little ice age.
What is disputed is the Anthropomorphic
in AGW, how much humans are contributing to this rise. The prevailing view here is little contribution by CO2, since the numbers over 1C per century given by IPCC comes from computer models with feedbacks that have been proven wrong. Without humidity feedbacks the models too would predict less than 1C per century.
So to stop all fossil burning CO2 would have no effect on rising temperatures and would mimic King Canute, who ordered the tides to recede.I will at least be able to face my children when they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say, “I tried”.
And if I am wrong I will be again able to say to my children that the world is a cleaner place because of the actions we unecessarily took.
This is much better than burying my head in the sand and hoping it will all go away.
Mike
Have you considered that the “unnecessarily undertaken ” action may have horrible consequences on the western societies and even worse on the third and fourth world? ( famine and deaths). Maybe the sand is preferable fo running around on a magic broom like an apprentice magician creating societal chaos.
There is a law of unintended consequences that quite pure hearted people have fallen victim to. DDT for example, and the ethanol fiasco that raised the price of food in the third world starting riots there come easily to mind. The european cap and trade has already brought misery in Africa because the EU stopped importing produce from there because of this idiotic cap and trade stystem.
The rich like Al Gore will enrich themselves with this pyramid scheme, the CO2 emitters will emit to their hearts content, and the third world will die. In the meanwhile all of us will pay more to emit, something like tobaco addiction, and energy for our cars and homes is much more addictive than tobaco.

“thefordprefect,
How many will suffer and die as a result of AGW if it is true? How many areas of the world will become uninhabitable. Will you welcome these refugees to become neighbours? How much area will become unfarmable? What happens to low lying areas (a metre of sea level rise does not just cover land falling below this level additional weathering will erode coasts more than the initial inundation)”
The land area available after the total loss of Greenland and Antarctic ice is not much less than currently available. (you will have those nice warm places Greenland and Antarctica to live on).
Almost certainly the food producing areas of the Earth will have increased. (think of all that lovely farmland in the Canadian Tundra and Siberia).
Why do alarmists never seem to think for themselves. You hear them regurgitate the same nonsense. Cities like New York will disappear beneath the waves etc etc.
Yeah right!
Why don’t they ask themselves how long it would take for this to happen(hundreds of years). Why don’t they then think what percentage of NY buildings are currently over one hundred years old? How many over two hundred years?
If sea levels rise, new buildings, which are going to be built anyway, will be built further inland. Over periods of hundreds of years NY will still exist, will still be on the sea shore, just the shoreline will look slightly different!
Alan

It’s not the poor that’re pouring out the CO2.
Wow. That has got to be both the most idiotic and misanthropic statement I’ve seen yet from an AGW ideologue, reminiscent of “Let them eat cake”.
Troll quality seems to be declining of late, and this latest seems more along the lines of the Edsel than the line he purports to be.
Danny Bloom (19:41:07) :I guess we won’t be needing polar cities after all. Life will go on as usual, no major problems ahead. I feel much better now. I agree: AGW is a hoax.
Wow, Danny, sarcasm. How refreshing. But, yes, all of your statements are pretty much true. Polar cities? What bright light came up with that idea? Life will hopefully go on, yes, but unfortunately, the AGW ideologues, eco-fascists, etc. are doing everything in their power to make life more difficult for everyone, especially the poor, by raising energy costs. Glad you feel better now – we aim to please! AGW a hoax? Glad you “agree”, but it’s actually much more than that. The AGW/CC
bandwagon, is huge, and has aboard many wide-ranging political groups, NGOs, and rent-and-glory-seeking individuals such as Gore and Hansen. In short, Belief in AGW/CC is useful to many, be it for political or monetary gain (often a mixture of both). The rest are useful idiots simply along for the ride because it’s fun, and because they believe they’re helping to “save the planet”. These are folks who will sign anything they think is “green” – even a petition against Dihydrogen Monoxide.

David Corcoran (14:02:59) :
. . . But more to the point… since the trend of rising ocean levels has stayed slow but steady since the 1870s, and CO2 level have supposedly only dramatically risen since the late 1950s… why haven’t the seas accellerated their rise? It’s as if CO2 doesn’t matter at all? Where’s the long-predicted spike?
Is a 140 year trend “cherry picking”? Is it weather rather than climate? none of the usual counter-arguments seem to apply.

I saw Fred Singer last night, who made the same point. He showed a graph of sea levels going back centuries that followed a generally straight line of 18 cm per century. His point was that despite periods of noticeable cooling and warming, the amount of sea-level increase did not change, i.e. anthropogenic ‘global warming’ did not affect it.
The event, by the way, turned out to be a small gathering in a classroom at Harvard, sponsored by a conservative student group. There were only about 20 people there. Dr. Singer’s presentation was informative, but somewhat halting. He had a lot of trouble hearing questions.
One student asked why his sea-level graph stopped at 1980; what about the last three decades? Once Dr. Singer understood the question, he fumbled for an answer, and told the student he’d talk to him after the event. Unfortunately, things dragged on, and the student left. I’d have liked to hear the answer myself.
I don’t mean to demean Fred Singer, who has done yeoman service in the cause of scientific realism and common sense. He gave a passionate defense of the much-maligned CO2, pointing out that if it reached very low levels the plants would die, and so would we.
But the event pointed up the dilemma that Realists face. A well-known Alarmist would have filled a big hall and drawn lots of attention. The press would have been there. Dr. Singer did not even attract a single ‘green’ protester.
The problem is that real science does not need, and should properly eschew, a ‘movement’. But the well-organized, world-wide groups (like Greenpeace, The Sierra Club, et al.) promoting climate Alarmism and drastic ‘solutions’ cannot be stopped without a counter movement. Without any prominent public spokesmen on the Realist side, people who can command an audience simply by showing up, Realists are no more than bugs on the Alarmists’ windshield.
Dr. Singer was wearing a button that said, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.” I came up at the end and suggested that it would make a good bumper sticker. He asked if I was on his SEPP list (I am) and gave me the button.
/Mr Lynn

Bruce Cobb (04:51:41) : Wow. That has got to be both the most idiotic and misanthropic statement I’ve seen yet from an AGW ideologue.
Why attack me. Why not attack the information with data that you have pised off the web? I am not an Ideolog, hit me with research that proves Anthropomorphic cl;imate change is false and I will convert.Alan Millar (04:49:46) Almost certainly the food producing areas of the Earth will have increased. (think of all that lovely farmland in the Canadian Tundra and Siberia).
I truly hope you are joking. Crops require certain nutrients and soil types to grow. I do not think arctic tundra has any of the requirements.anna v (04:25:10) :
I do not think there will be anybody on this board to deny that we have been warming since the little ice age.
Many have denied the evidence of warming – actic/glaciers/measured temperature/etc.
DDT for example,
DDT is a persitant poison – does not degrade – see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
The european cap and trade has already brought misery in Africa because the EU stopped importing produce from there because of this idiotic cap and trade stystem.
I assume the CAP you refer to is not the Common Agricultural Policy which can affect food imports and has nothing to do with GW.http://www.environmentalleader.com/2008/07/04/mit-report-world-can-learn-from-european-cap-and-trade-system/
The EU cap-and-trade system has operated well and has had little or no negative impact on the overall EU economy, according to an MIT analysis.
this article suggests jobs are being forced abroad damaging the EU:http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=14411
perhaps if you have a link to the suffering in africa you could post it?
Mike

Why do alarmists never seem to think for themselves. You hear them regurgitate the same nonsense.

They do think for themselves, sort of. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of them know the claims they use range from wildly exaggerated to patently false, they simply use them as a veneer over their hypocritical contempt for modern civilization even as they enjoy the fruits of it instead of toughing it out in a mud hut like they expect their future slaves to do. Where they cease to think for themselves is in failing to realize that those ambitions are being manipulated; carbon taxes will not reform society to their ideals, they are simply the next logical step in the same old process of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

rationalpsychic (16:21:04) :
What does a Gallup poll have to do with the amount of CO2 that is actually in the air?
What does the amount of co2 in the air have to do with a discussion about public attitudes to global warming hype?

Comments:
1. “The world’s poor”… NOT First World poor, who maybe can’t afford an Xbox 360 but have food, water, a bathroom, the option of being on the dole… Third World poor, who die the day they stop struggling. People who live in countries where, when a pedestrian is hit by a car their body may lie beside the road for days, with people walking around it, before being removed. These are the majority of people in this world, and are unlikely to be online giving their opinion on anything. We’ve managed to cut their numbers by MILLIONS by banning a relatively harmless insecticide, why not let them starve and freeze to death too? (yes, last phrase sarcasm).
2. Precautionary Principle: “how can it hurt to do this, what if you’re wrong and AGW is real?” … EASY answer. The alarmists are NOT CREDIBLE. Wild-eyed increasingly shrill dire warnings of consequences too horrible to comprehend? Please. Everyone by now MUST know that CO2 levels have been several times what the current straight-line extrapolation will put us at in 100 years. The very concept of a “tipping point” in a stable self-correcting system such as a planetary atmosphere is among the most absurd and ridiculous part of it all. It will hurt FAR MORE to jolt our entire way of life than adapting to all but the most fire-and-brimstone alarmist predicted consequences.
3. It only counts if it’s mainstream / peer reviewed. Still among the most ridiculous arguments around. So because Time Magazine hasn’t done a special “How our desire to screw oil companies killed millions in the third world” issue, there is no such problem? When the “peers” are all in the same club, you wonder why they won’t “review” an outsider’s work? Amazing.

Lucy Skywalker (10:17:56) :
Tallbloke thanks a lot for that bit of work. I’ll try to incorporate it, plus the post-2002 graph showing the correlation still fits. Interesting thing is, Ed had a point too – why does the CO2 shoot up from 2002 on?
Welcome. The co2 curve is detrended to obtain a best fit in my graphs, so the ‘shooting up’ is an artifact of the data representation to an extent. The co2 increase hasn’t accelerated much since 2002. The main reason for the divergence is that the temperature has been falling!

Mary Hinge (01:26:47) :
Apparently you spout your own talking points without reading the on-point reply refuting your pal DJ.
Are you commenting from ignorance? Or from laziness? In either case, I’ll help you out by re-posting again what just one (1) skeptical scientist out of hundreds of other publications written by skeptical scientists: click
I have plenty more skeptics’ publications available. Just ask, and I’ll provide the links.
So rather than repeat your *wrong* talking points, the link above lists a couple of hundred publications from only one skeptic — which you should start reading. It will take a lot more time and effort than repeating your dishonest talking point about skeptics not publishing. But you might learn something.

prefect:
“hit me with research that proves Anthropomorphic climate change is false and I will convert”
Again…no one has to prove it is false,…it hasn’t been “proven” to be real.
As for documenting strife in 3rd world countries for you…I’d say the absurdity of that request makes discussions with you a waste of time…
JimB

Merrick (16:59:32) :
“Phil’s Dad… how do you figure? It looks like those lines cross well before 2012 to me.”
Just a bit of fun but I was taking the 98 – 09 rate rather than the current slope.
Just Want Truth… (22:28:21) :
“I suppose if documentaries like The Great Global Warming Swindle and Doomsday Called Off were shown on tv a few times the rate would speed up.”
Maybe; but the (10 month old) MORI survey below shows that it is social group A/B that are the strongest AGW supporters. Programmes need to be made with this in mind.
By the way at the bottom of page 1 it shows that UK attitudes to the “Is it exaggerated?” question are about the same as in the USA.http://www.ipsos-mori.com/_assets/pdfs/public%20attitudes%20to%20climate%20change%20-%20for%20website%20-%20final.pdf

The technical discussion on climate change is very important. However…
I came accross the video bellow that shows a risk assessment approach to this issue that I believe makes sense. It involves people to act if in doubt.http://manpollo.org/

“DDT for example,” Yes DDT is a toxin and MUST be used with care.
But the DDT ban was a CLASSIC case unintended consequences.
The DDT ban cost millions of lives due to malaria. The blood of their deaths is on the hands of eco weenies from developed countries who imposed their wants on the poor.
Sound familiar. Here we go again.

thefordprefect (09:44:41)
“I will at least be able to face my children when they struggle with a planet very different to today’s and say, “I tried”.
And if I am wrong I will be again able to say to my children that the world is a cleaner place because of the actions we unecessarily took.”
Ford, you are just the kind of forward-looking person I’m looking for. What you need is an investment strategy for the future. This is your opportunity to be among the first to get a ground-floor stake in the investment opportunity of the century. I’m talking about Sandw15’s South Texas Sea Resort Communities. I can fix you up with real estate which is now nearly worthless ranch land but which will soon be very valuable ocean front property. Imagine having a beach villa on the shores of a brand spanking new shallow sea. You could even afford your own island in the warm waters of the new South Texas Sea.
Worried about cost, you say? No problem. This is the perfect time to invest in real estate…and because of the current economic conditions, large tracts of land can be bought for a song. Building costs in South Texas are amongst the lowest in the country and we can fix you up with anything from a small vacation cottage to a mansion at an unbelievably low cost…and if you commit to building before January 2011 we’ll throw in a fishing pier, absolutely free. All you have to do is tell us where the shoreline will be and we’ll take care of the rest. Imagine having your own paradise-on-earth waiting for the Gulf of Mexico to roll in.
And for the first hundred buyers, we’re offering an all expenses paid trip to the First Annual Sandw15 Death Valley Regatta. (To be scheduled at a later date). Don’t wait. This introductory offer will expire at the end of 2010 or upon the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (whichever comes first).
“This is much better than burying my head in the sand and hoping it will all go away.”
Sand? You bet, it’s almost my middle name…there’ll be plenty of it. I guaranty it or we’ll truck it in for you…free!
Need some help around the mansion? You’ll need Sandw15’s Displaced Maldivian Employment Service to provide gardeners and maids. We’ve thought of everything. You should act now. As somebody in the White House said…”Never let a global climate catastrophe go to waste.”

CodeTech (08:51:37) :
DDT is NOT harmless – look it up.
In 1955, the World Health Organization commenced a program to eradicate malaria worldwide, relying largely on DDT…initially highly successful, … However resistance soon emerged in many insect populations as a consequence of widespread agricultural use of DDT. …
DDT was less effective in tropical regions due to the continuous life cycle of mosquitoes and poor infrastructure. …Spraying programs (especially using DDT) were curtailed due to concerns over … but mostly because mosquitoes were developing resistance to DDT.[18
Smokey (11:23:32)
JimB (11:30:59) :
Parse Error (07:58:28) :
All you do is insult the oposition – humour us tell us the facts that persuaded you AGW is not real. Answer us with facts not insults please
My last word unless you decide to debate rather than insult:
The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.
19th Century Cree saying:
Only when the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.
Bye
Mike

thefordprefect (07:23:09) :Why attack me. Why not attack the information with data that you have pised off the web? I am not an Ideolog, hit me with research that proves Anthropomorphic cl;imate change is false and I will convert.
Fine, if you are really interested, as you claim, then start with Lucy Skywalker’sprimer, which has some excellent links. Her story of how she went from being an AGW believer to a Skeptic is compelling. Many of us here have followed a similar route.
Happy reading!

“All you do is insult the oposition – humour us tell us the facts that persuaded you AGW is not real. Answer us with facts not insults please”
The world was warmer in 1200 than it is now.
Seven times in the last million years the world has plunged from an awful lot warmer than now into full-on ice-ages, and then back again.
High CO2 has not stopped ice-ages happening, and low CO2 has not prevented the natural inter-glacial warmings.
Therefore CO2 has no relevance to earth’s climate.
That a natural warming trend should be declared ‘man-made’ and ‘run-away’ may be politically convenient, but it is scientifically unsupportable, particularly after it is over.

prefect:
“All you do is insult the oposition – humour us tell us the facts that persuaded you AGW is not real. Answer us with facts not insults please
My last word unless you decide to debate rather than insult:”
You last word?…would that it be so. You’ve been given references, examples, and challenges, none of which you’ve been either accepting of, or risen to.
Why won’t Hansen release his data manipulation sequences?…more importantly, why aren’t YOU asking HIM that, instead of accusing me of insults and demanding proof to change your mind?
Why aren’t you holding the scientists who’s view you espouse to the same level of proof you’re demanding here?
Frankly, I would hope that it is your last word.
JimB

As for facts, here are some of the things I base my questions on:
1) No adherence to “full disclosure” or transparency on data and experiments. How anyone can fall for that one, I’m still not sure. The very basis of science is the ability to reproduce results. And not by a few of your friends, but by the scientific community at large.
2) Deliberate falsification of “facts” such as Gore’s movie. Why shift the CO2 spikes?
3) IPCC reports. Dig in to those, and discover for yourself who actually writes them, who actually provides input to them, and who controls the reports. Find out if the scientists ever get to review the drafts of the reports before they’re published.
4) Again, with respect to the IPCC, read their reports and discover for yourself that at the heart of everything is the statement “Well…we couldn’t find anything else that explains it, so it must be C02.” WTF???? If that isn’t a “flat earth” statement, I don’t know what is.
I could go on…but why bother?…Do you really have any interest in actually discoving anything?…it seems not, but maybe I’m wrong.
At least I’m willing to admit that…You?…apparently not so much.
JimB

All you do is insult the oposition – humour us tell us the facts that persuaded you AGW is not real.

I don’t recall insulting you personally, I asked you a series of questions which you evaded because we both know what the real issue is, and then explained those underlying motives among your demographic in general to somebody else. If you find your own core beliefs to be insulting, perhaps you should either modify them, or not get your feelings hurt when people point them out.
Now, as for AGW being real, that depends on what you mean. Is CO2 a trace, weak greenhouse gas capable of causing a small amount of warming? Absolutely! The question is, does that small amount of warming result in the proposed catastrophic positive feedback loop? If that were demonstrated to be occurring in the real world, I’d throw away my computer and television immediately, change into a comfortable loincloth and go swinging on vines through the jungle. However, countless scientists funded with unimaginable sums of money have spent decades searching for that evidence, and I have yet to hear anything about it despite saturation coverage of this “climate crisis” of the glaciers melting, which they were already doing before we even came up with agriculture, let alone industrialization. The more facts and even the planet itself refuse to cooperate with the alarmists, the louder they scream that the end is nigh unless we repent, because they have a chip on their shoulder against society and this issue is their perfect weapon.

The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.

So what about you? You’re on a computer, which took a respectable release of greenhouse gas to manufacture, and even if you happen to run it off a solar panel rather than the coal-fired power grid, you’re still being served resources from a vast network of coal powered hardware, and that’s just for a start. Why aren’t you living in a mud hut or a cave or something, instead of telling other people they should, while you continue to live in modern luxury? Not to mention, why do you feel it’s appropriate to make a generalization about our values when you consider it insulting for anyone else to so much as mention your own?

thefordprefect says:The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.
And that, sir, is what makes you an AGW ideologue. You’ve just outed yourself. Thanks for playing. Bye, now.

“thefordprefect says:
The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.
No sir, that is NOT the case. Maybe we may have different definitions of what those needs are? Funny…why didn’t you think of that, instead of resorting to ad hom? And you said I was tossing insults? Unreal.
Anyway…No…I do NOT value my current lifestyle over the needs of the planet. I believe the most basic, rudimentary needs for the poorest populations is cheap, available power. It is the single most influential element in raising the standard of living of third world populations.
Give them power. Give them a means to cultivate crops. Give them the means to store food for more than a day.
No…I say it is you who have put your lifestyle above the needs of the planet.
Jim

NOTE TO “thefordprefect”
“thefordprefect says:
The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.
You know, this REALLY chaps my hide, especially since I’m doing a lot of green things myself, and have made major green contributions in the past.
I put solar on my home
I put solar on a local school, a 125 KW system
I drive an electric car for in-town use, an NEV
I once worked with weathercasters around the USA to promote “Arbor Day Weather Week” in response to Jim Hansen’s 1988 call to action at US congress. It ran in 1990 and 1991 and was sponsored by the National Arbor Day Foundation. Each year they reported about 250,000 tree were planted based on the program requests for seedlings.
And many others who frequent here have done green and conservation things as well. You’ve lumped everyone into your world view and hurled a faux pau of major proportions.
So “thefordprefect” whoever the hell you are (just another anonymous coward making unsubstantiated claims) let me make this clear: apologize for your broad generalization as “we don’t care about the planet” or get the hell off my blog.
I’m not interested in debating the issue, I’m not interested in your excuses. I’m not interested if you are offended. Apologize contritely or leave, those are the terms.
-Anthony WattsUPDATE: I have been in email contact, and I suggested this would be an appropriate response:

“I’m sorry that I made a generalization that assumes all posters here don’t care about our environment. I will be more careful with my words in the future.”

The person who is “thefordprefect” preferred not to issue a simple apology (such as the one I suggested or something similar) for the statement posted, and thus will not be posting on WUWT anymore.
– Anthony

thefordprefect says:“The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.”
What sophistry. What delusional pretentious self-serving tripe. What typical empty leftist posturing.
Leave the slogans behind next time with the unicorn and pixie dust distributing “progressives”. This isnt “Firedog Lake”.

Parse Error (15:02:35) :
So what about you? You’re on a computer, which took a respectable release of greenhouse gas to manufacture, and even if you happen to run it off a solar panel rather than the coal-fired power grid, you’re still being served resources from a vast network of coal powered hardware, and that’s just for a start. Why aren’t you living in a mud hut or a cave or something, instead of telling other people they should, while you continue to live in modern luxury? Not to mention, why do you feel it’s appropriate to make a generalization about our values when you consider it insulting for anyone else to so much as mention your own?

I always pose the same essential question, but the replies are always hand-waving nonsense. It’s always “do as I say not as I do”.
Of course the REAL Ford Prefect would never be so pretentious…

wattsupwiththat (16:51:06) :
NOTE TO “thefordprefect”
“thefordprefect says:
The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.
You know, this REALLY chaps my hide, especially since I’m doing a lot of green things myself, and have made major green contributions in the past. . .

The real problem, Anthony, with this guy’s charge, is that it’s a trap. He assumes that he (and others of his ilk) know what “the needs of the planet” are.
We’re all for conservation, like Mom and apple pie, but we’re not all for stopping progress in its tracks, or for giving up the enormous technological and productive achievements of modern civilization, which is what the ‘greenies’ seem to want.
In my view what’s good for ‘the planet’ and what’s good for the human race are the same thing. And what’s good for humanity is continued progress, economic growth, and the expansion of the great frontier to the solar system and the stars. ‘The planet’ is our birthplace, and we should treat it gently and with respect, because it’ll always be our home. But we can’t let obsessive neo-Luddites and neo-Marxists damp down the flame of human development and progress.
The continued development of human society is going to take energy, lots and lots of it. The ‘greens’ want us to stop using fossil fuels, and anything else we can mine from the Earth’s crust; they want us to retrench, admit defeat, and hunker down to a miserable third-world existence—except for the privileged few, of course, who will lord it over the rest of us.
Don’t fall for it. Conservation means common sense and sound stewardship of our birthplace Earth; it does not mean giving up the future.
/Mr Lynn

Anthony Watts, Hear! Hear! I wish I could be a town crier and draw everyone’s attention to the “line-in-the-sand” you have drawn to protect the discussion– not that all readers of WUWT won’t take notice anyway. I believe we need more of this limit setting for trolls, not less. As a naive innocent I began on the internet at the beginning of last year under the moniker “thoughtfulvetting”. During the next number of months I experienced the violence, the calculated hijacking of sincere, intelligent blogs. I have since then been trying to find those blogs that will tolerate open discussion (representative democracy and science in my book) but will brook no calculated destruction of the thread’s discussion. I have found more of my ideal on WUWT than most other places. I applaud your efforts.

@thefordprefect
Re “The problem with you skeptics is you value your current lifestyle (= wealth) over the needs of the planet.”
Hmmm…. sir, your ignorance is showing. You are way out of line.
I am a skeptic, as I have written before on WUWT, and I emphatically deny that which is demonstrably false in the AGW mantra. I do value my lifestyle, yet that is consistent with achieving the greatest good for the greatest number on the planet.
So, let me just state how my colleagues in various engineering fields, and I to a small extent, have made the globe a safer, healthier, less polluted place, extended life expectancies, and that sort of thing. First, I worked as a chemical engineer in the petroleum and petrochemical industry for 25 years. I am an attorney now, but that is another story.
During those 25 years, I worked first in the chlorine and caustic industry, manufacturing chlorine and sodium hydroxide and hydrogen from salt, water, and electricity. Chlorine is one of modern man’s most important manufactures, valued for its use as a bleach, a cleansing agent, a disinfectant for water, and it greatly improves health all around the world where it is used.
Chlorine is also a major ingredient in plastic, especially PVC and other types of plastic pipe. Such pipe has made plumbing cost-effective in much of the world, greatly improving health. A high-grade of PVC plastic is used extensively in medicine, as an example, to hold a fluid that is fed into a patient’s veins (the IV bag), and the plastic tubing itself. The other major component of plastic comes from petrochemical plants, usually ethylene or propylene.
I cannot even begin to describe the innumerable medicines, drugs, and pharmaceuticals that are made from the petrochemicals we create in the big refineries and petrochemical plants. None of those would be possible if not for the ingenuity of chemists, chemical engineers, and a host of other highly educated and trained professionals.
The overall clean air of this planet is entirely due to petroleum and natural gas. Without them, the population would have choked to death or wheezed in coughing agony during a very short life-span.
Prior to oil use and natural gas, energy was provided by burning coal, and from animal power such as horses, mules, and oxen. The coal smoke and soot, and huge piles of poop left by those animals was a very great problem in cities, and made obsolete by gasoline, diesel, and electric motors. The poop dried, attracted flies, and created toxic dust particles when the wind blew. People inhaled that toxic, polluted air with every breath. But no more, thanks to oil and natural gas.
I could go on and on, describing the very low cost of almost all goods and services due to the extremely cheap energy provided by oil men, the refineries, and power plants. Transportation costs dropped dramatically across the board as trains grew faster, longer, and used less fuel per ton-mile. The same is true for large trucks, and ships.
I could also mention the low cost of food, whether grain or beef, pork, chicken, lamb, or the myriad of fruits and vegetables, all of which are very low-cost as a result of chemistry and chemical plants that produce fertilizers and herbicides. Engineers also design, build, and operate the efficient food processing plants that place low-cost groceries in the stores.
So, I invite you to do some reading, do some research, and find out the facts about what wealth does to improve the plight of the common man. Find out which countries in the world have a long waiting list before being allowed to enter to work or live or become a citizen. Find out which countries have good medical care, have sanitary water and dispose of waste in a sanitary manner, have sufficient food to eat that does not make the population sicken and die, and sufficient affordable energy to heat and cool their homes to a comfortable level.
I should know. As a chemical engineer, I traveled and worked in more than a dozen countries, from first-world (USA, Europe, Canada, Japan) to third-world (China, East Germany, Poland (pre-demise of Soviet Union), Brazil, Indonesia). I have seen it all, and did my part to improve much of it, along with my colleagues. I have suffered many bouts of intestinal illness in third-world locales.
After you improve your education, then come back and tell me I value my current lifestyle, wealth, over the needs of the planet. As Dr. Thomas Sowell (no relation) of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution has written, increasing prosperity is the only sure and lasting solution to poverty.

that Gallup poll even made it to the Canadian main stream media. In response, I posted this rant to Macleans Magazine (so far, it hasn’t shown up):
The question “Is the threat of climate change exaggerated” is misleading but symptomatic of the massive confusion and distortion of the issue by the Main Street Media, politicians, best-selling authors and a myriad of member-soliciting organizations. Climate change is one of the most important determinants of cultural evolutions – it has always shaped the rise and decline of civilizations, sometimes subtly, often very dramatically. Warmer periods typically have brought great advances that have then been followed by colder dark ages. Examples: the Roman Optimum, when the centurions crossed the practically glacier-free Alps to expand their Empire all over Europe; the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings settled Greenland and explored Atlantic Canada; and the Little Ice Age with hundred year wars, famines and more.
Today, the shrill claims “we need to stop/combat/fight climate change”, “the debate is over” and “the science is settled” are either opportunistic power grabs, orchestrated moneymaking schemes to exploit environmental guilt or well-meant apocalyptic confusions. If one uses such bellicose terms, wouldn’t it serve to define what kind of climate change is meant and who the enemy is that needs to be fought so urgently? The proponents of such dire rallying cries, be it President Obama, the hapless Stephane Dion or a multi-national environmental NGO, always mean anthropogenic or man-made climate change, brought on by this dastardly polluting life gas CO2. We all spew it into the atmosphere with each breath, trees absorb and respire it and we contribute it with abandon through our SUVs and coal-fired power stations.
Surely, these eco-warriors and Planet Earth saviors don’t mean to imply that we could change real, i.e. natural climate change? That we feeble humans could change the cosmic and planetary forces of solar storms, cosmic rays and their poorly understood interplay with that grand hot water bottle, the global ocean or that atmospheric blanket that keeps us at liveable temperatures? If they mean that, they are delusional – the true scientific facts are mounting despite that huge agenda-driven roller coaster. Kyoto has clearly demonstrated that it is a forum for “Hot Air” discussions and a waste of tax payers’ money to shuffle thousands of functionaries to exotic locales. The concept of global temperature changes of fractions of degrees is quite meaningless, as are the computer models that drive the craze. However, it does make sense trying to embrace better habitat stewardship and to understand Earth’s metabolism so that we can respond and adapt to natural climate change and further prosper – that requires objective science instead of agenda-driven doom-and-gloom clamoring.
In short, it’s time to stop the foolishness. Such opinion polls are starting to reveal that the populace is waking up. The efforts for Kyoto Two may run into turbulence – only nine months left. Time is now for concerted action towards some sanity, aimed at tackling real world issues.”

Danny Bloom (19:41:07) :
I guess we won’t be needing polar cities after all
Hey Danny,
I saw on your blog the virtual village in the snow, with the following caption:
“Entrance to climate retreat. Security will be very important. Who gets in, who is kept out?”
Interesting question, what’s the answer?
Hows the court case going by the way. 🙂

For permission, contact us. See the About>Contact menu under the header.

All rights reserved worldwide.

Some material from contributors may contain additional copyrights of their respective company or organization.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on WUWT. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. This notice is required by recently enacted EU GDPR rules, and since WUWT is a globally read website, we need to keep the bureaucrats off our case!
Cookie Policy